


Face to Face

by ncfan



Series: Femslash Big Bang [11]
Category: Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types, La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fantasy, Femslash, Femslash Big Bang, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Food Porn, Gen, Genderswap, Other, POV Female Character, Pining, Rule 63, Slow Burn, Trauma, Triggers, female beast
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-09-28 02:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 36,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17174063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Her father went bankrupt, and Belle and her family moved away from the city where they had lived to a dilapidated old house far away in the countryside. After that, Belle expected to spend the rest of her life in obscurity. But after three years, her father was summoned back to the city with a chance to recover what they had lost, and before he left, he asked his daughters what they would like him to bring them.Belle’s sisters asked for finery. Belle asked for a rose.She had no idea what a fateful request that would be.





	1. Chapter One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note about location and time period: this fic isn’t set in any land in particular, and though it is pre-modern, the time period is deliberately left vague. This is a fairytale, set in a fairytale land, and for certain aspects of the story, I did _not_ want to be constrained by the limitations of real-life history. As for Belle’s name and the names of her family and the natives of the city where she was born all being French, that was just meant as a nod to the original story being French.
> 
> A note about the fic in particular: all trigger warnings pertain to the chapter in which they appear.
> 
> [ **CN/TW** : brief mentions of animal cruelty]

Every strike of the gavel, coming at such uneven intervals as it was, sometimes a space of five minutes between blows, sometimes scarcely five seconds (Belle suspected the auctioneer had come to _understandings_ with certain of the bidders beforehand), felt like a strike against the very foundations of the house. They rang out so crisp and clear, even as far away from the scavengers as Belle was, that if you had told Belle that the strike of the gavel was actually the strike of an axe against the beams of their house, she would have been hard-pressed to disagree.

Belle sat silent and still in her wicker chair in the attic. Her older sisters did not share her composure—though whether it was composure or mere numbness, Belle did not know; anger twisted below the surface of her skin, but there were only so many routes by which it could escape. Solène fretted in her own chair, winding the end of her green muslin sash around plump fingers. Ghislaine, the oldest of them, paced up and down the length of the attic, her too-heavy footfalls making the rough, splinter-bristling gray floorboards creek. She had plenty of room to pace in; most of the attic’s former contents were now downstairs, up for grabs, leaving behind only a few chairs and two chests half-full of odds and ends. Ghislaine’s arms were tucked behind her back, fingers laced together, knuckles stark white.

“It’s taking longer than he said it would,” Ghislaine muttered, glaring down at the floor.

“Perhaps Master Benoît is fielding higher bids than he’d expected,” Belle suggested, to soften the glare on Ghislaine’s face, to still Solène’s fretting hands. “It _would_ take longer then, wouldn’t it?”

The smile Ghislaine bestowed her youngest sister was a creature of commingled bitterness and weariness. “Would that I could believe that, but you did not oversee things when our belongings were appraised. I did.” She shook her head, chestnut brown curls trembling and the lines of worry that had begun to etch themselves into her brow two and a half months ago reappearing. “So many of our things are of great value only to us,” she muttered.

Ghislaine’s aspect was the cold, hard numbness of stone, and Belle could think of nothing to say that would have made it otherwise. She sank back into her creaking wicker chair, and tried to block the crisp strike of the gavel from her mind.

Theirs was a story that had doubtless been told countless times across the history of the world. Once upon a time, there was a prosperous merchant, so wealthy that you might have thought him a nobleman, if not for the gulf that stood between him and that exalted rank. Nevertheless, he was celebrated as a genius of his trade, and being a widower, was pursued by many different suitors, despite the fact that he was not a young man and had three daughters to care for.

About those daughters: they too were fêted by society as wealthy heiresses and accomplished young ladies. The eldest, Ghislaine, was four and twenty years old and the clear heir apparent to the Merchant’s business. She was inclined to sharpness, but was rarely what anyone could call truly unkind, and the keenness of her mind far outweighed the sharpness of her tongue. Solène, two and twenty, was an accomplished hostess, who paid special attention to the supper menu; any guest being entertained in _her_ house would be treated to the sort of feast counts and magistrates would envy. She was on top of that a singer of no small talent, and when found in a ballroom was more likely to be found singing among the musicians than dancing on the floor.

Though all the Merchant’s daughters were fair to look upon, it was Belle, the youngest of the sisters at nine and ten, who was regarded as the true beauty of the family. She was of middling height, neither short nor tall, her figure well-fed and plump. Her skin was a smooth ivory that warmed to pink at her cheeks and the tip of her nose, at fingertips and knuckles and knees. Her hair was a lustrous auburn that shone scarlet in sunlight and crimson in shadow; when loose, it fell halfway down her back in rippling waves. Set in an oval of a face were full, red lips; a thin, pointed nose; a narrow jaw; clear, silver-gray eyes that could catch a deceiver in a lie more swiftly than most.

What most people remembered about Belle was that she was beautiful, and gentle, and gracious. They tended not to remember her at her reading, tended not to remember the calluses that had formed after countless hours playing the lute and the virginal and the flute, tended not to remember her sitting in the dirt with the gardener, tending to the rose garden behind her house. Her beauty put such things, among many others, far from the minds of most who knew her.

The Merchant and his family seemed to live a charmed life: wealthy, prosperous, with no shortage of friends or suitors (Though none of the four of them had their heart set on any one of these). But charm is fickle, and luck is rarely merciful when it turns against you.

The first stroke of calamity came in the form of a fire. A fire in the warehouse district of the city consumed many warehouses, including the one where the Merchant stored all of the goods he currently had on hand for sale. This was certainly a loss, but it was one the Merchant might have recovered from, had the second stroke of calamity not fallen so shortly afterwards.

Where the first stroke of calamity had been dealt at the hands of fire, the second was dealt at the hands of water. The Merchant was in possession of three ships he used to obtain goods for sale from distant ports, and all three of those ships, each heavily laden with goods, were lost at sea in a terrible storm. The Merchant had had a great deal of money riding on his present venture, and when he lost his ships, he lost it all.

Belle and her family were left with great mountains of debt, and little money with which to render them to anthills. Their creditors would not be denied; by law, _could_ not be denied. The house within which Belle dwelled was no longer her family’s house; it had been sold, and the proceeds were all to go to their creditors. The value of the house was not enough—thus, the auction. The family obtained a small house in the country and retained a yet smaller fraction of their former belongings, and a fraction of their former debt that was unfortunately still rather far from being an anthill. When you rise high, you have far to fall.

Or, at least, that was what Belle had been hearing out of the mouths of those she had once called friends, those few friends who would still own to knowing her.

Solène had been murmuring for days about a sudden, unexpected windfall, but Belle, who had not the heart to disabuse her of the notion, stayed silent. That was the stuff of fairytales. Life rarely adhered to the gentle logic of fairytales.

At length, the strikes of the gavel which had been so effective in throwing an ordered mind into tense, jerky disarray, ceased. There was a great, muffled susurrus downstairs, the sound of something creaking against wood, and finally footfalls on the stairs outside, and a light, crisp knock on the door.

Solène hopped up out of her chair as if it—or she—was spring-loaded, and strode over to the door. Master Benoît stood on the other side, his crisp black jacket barely reflecting any of the light from the window on the landing. “And that,” he said in his precise, somewhat crackly voice, “is that.”

As they followed him back downstairs, Ghislaine took the lead on questions. Solène went back to fiddling with her sash, and Belle, whose own hands were itching, kept them at her sides with some difficulty and instead listened. Listened for any sign of movement. Listened for her father, listened for the servants before remembering that they had dismissed them—dismissed the ones who hadn’t already left—last week, listened for her friends before remembering that she hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them in over a fortnight. The silence could not even assault her ears. It lied out like a corpse that didn’t know it was supposed to decay, cold and dead and static.

It was too quiet. She focused on Ghislaine’s voice instead.

“—did they sell?”

Master Benoît shrugged. “About as well as we had expected. There was some variance, but the items that fetched more than was expected were balanced out by the ones that fetched less.”

“Our father?”

“Is not here.”

“He was meeting with the man who bought the house,” Solène interjected. “He may still be with him.”

“As to that, Miss, I have no idea. I was simply asked to oversee the auction.”

They saw him to the front door, where Master Benoît left with no real farewell, except that he would return later to speak to the Merchant about the results of the auction. Once past the door, he walked far more hurriedly than he had within, shoulders hunched and stride long.

Once he was safely out of earshot, Ghislaine snorted. “Look at him,” she muttered, sharp blue eyes fixed on Master Benoît’s retreating form. “You’d think this house had been struck with plague, not poverty.”

Belle knew she ought to say something, but she was looking at his black-clad back and watching how, at one point, it looked like he was having to restrain himself from breaking into a run. She wasn’t sorry to see him go.

“It’s almost over,” Belle said, and turned to look at what had been the entrance hall and receiving area of their home. It had rained that morning, and the wan sunlight pouring through the now-curtainless windows made the tiled floor and ash gray walls gleam. …It all looked so much bigger when it was empty, when all the furniture and all the wall hangings were gone. Her voice had a faint, tinny echo following behind it.

 _I don’t want to leave_.

Solène let out a high-pitched hiccup of a laugh. “We still have all the packing to do. And there’s still finalizing the sale of the house—and, oh, we need to find a way to get enough food for the journey; Father said it would take weeks to get there with the wagons.” She crushed her sash in her hands. “I wish this wasn’t happening at all, oh…”

Over Solène’s head, Ghislaine shared a meaningful look with Belle. The latter rubbed Solène’s left arm in an attempt to soothe her, while the former told her, “I’m not certain everything we put up for auction sold. We had better see what’s left of that, just to make certain we won’t need another wagon for our belongings. Will you help us look them over?”

Solène blinked once, twice, three times, her hazel eyes almost glazed as they darted around. But after a few moments, those glazed eyes cleared. She sucked in a deep breath and nodded. “I… Yes, yes, I think I shall. We’ve only the essentials left as it is; we certainly wouldn’t want the day to arrive and find we had to choose _which_ essentials we have to keep.”

 _I don’t want to have to choose at all._ Belle nodded and smiled, and batted down the scream rising in her throat. Doing so was almost effortless, now. She’d had days and weeks to practice.

The kitchen was the place to look first. All the essentials in cookware had been set aside as ineligible for auctioning off—asides from the fact that they were all things anyone could find in any properly-stocked kitchen in any house in the city, they were going to _need_ those things out in the country. The house their father had found for them had only most basic furnishings, and cookware was _not_ included.

When she could bring herself to think about it at all, Belle sometimes wondered how well the food they ate in the country was going to taste. They couldn’t afford to retain a cook—the only reason they had food cooked _for_ them now was because one of the Merchant’s old friends had taken pity on him and sent his head cook over twice a day to cook for them. Neither Belle nor either of her sisters had any experience with cooking. They’d all been taught how to prepare a menu, how to oversee a kitchen, and Belle supposed they could always follow the instructions in a cookbook, but it all seemed a little dubious. Solène might turn out to be a passable cook. Of the three of them, she had spent the most time overseeing the preparation of their meals. But Belle and Ghislaine would likely produce only rubbish, at least at first.

Perhaps it would be alright, eventually. But they were going to a place that Belle had never seen and were leaving behind everything Belle had ever known, and she couldn’t imagine it, now. When they got there, she would have no choice but to think of it more optimistically. She was allowed this pessimism when it was all still ahead of her. Wasn’t she?

Beyond the most vital of their cookware, little had been kept in the kitchen. The finest of their cutlery was sold, leaving only the plainest pieces, the steel rather than the silver. The finest of their china was gone now, too, all the porcelain and most of the stoneware. Only their plain white set was left, along with the stoneware set that had allegedly been their mother’s favorite, painted a pale, spring green with alternating pheasants and peacocks—

“I don’t believe it!”

Or maybe not.

Solène looked up from her own inspection, joining Belle in staring at Ghislaine, who was visibly trembling, grinding her teeth together so hard that Belle could hear her from several feet away. Solène and Belle exchanged tense glances, before Solène tilted her head to one side and asked Ghislaine what the matter was.

“Mother’s dishes,” Ghislaine ground out. “They’re gone.”

They had only ever been dishes to Belle. Pretty dishes with a pretty design, but _only_ pretty dishes with a pretty design. She walked over to the cabinet where those dishes should have been while Solène fairly flew across the room. Watched in bemusement that was beginning to edge into irritation as Solène frantically searched the cabinet in the hope that Ghislaine might be wrong.

“They’re gone.” Solène licked her lips, swallowed hard. Blinked once, twice, three times, as her eyes did not glaze over, but grew very bright. “They’re really gone.”

While Ghislaine seethed and Solène tried not to cry, a germ of suspicion in Belle’s mind sprouted to a choking vine. “If those dishes are gone,” she said in a very soft voice, “they’re probably not the only things that were stolen.”

She wanted to be wrong. They’d already suffered indignities enough—the idea that the people who had once been their friends and peers would now be willing to _spit_ on them like this was hardly one that could be countenanced gladly. _That’s silly of me. They’ve already abandoned us—no well-wishers at our door in more than a month, and I’ve seen people pointing at us in the street and sniggering, I… don’t remember how many times. It’s silly to assume they wouldn’t do this, too_. But that was uncharitable, and she didn’t say it aloud.

But a quick look over the ground floor of the house revealed that, indeed, their mother’s dishes were not the only things missing. A keepsake box here, a candlestick there. When the sisters came to their father’s study, Solène’s eyes darted over the room, over the Merchant’s desk, and she pressed a hand to her mouth, the “Oh, _no_ ,” that escaped muffled and barely audible.

Once Belle’s eyes lit on the desk, it didn’t take long for her to realize what was missing. She bit down hard on her tongue.

“Those little _thieves_ ,” Ghislaine muttered, halfway between fury and exhaustion.

Their father had a taste for knick-knacks. Over the years, he had acquired many small sculptures and lengths of decorative cloth and jewelry he’d never wear and many other thing. Recognizing that he could not ask his daughters to part with the vast majority of their belongings and yet not part with this, the greater part of those knick-knacks had been sold off, leaving only a small few that held more sentimental value than they did monetary value.

Of those, the most prized was a figurine of a giraffe, a foot in height, carved from the wood of a thorn tree, painted bright yellow and deep black. A figurine of a giraffe that was now missing from its place on his desk.

Belle stared at the empty spot where the figurine had been, at the little clean spots in the fine layer of dust where its hooves had been. She scarcely heard her sisters. Instead, she was trying to remember how long it had been since she had last caught that boy skulking around in here, tried to remember if it was the giraffe figurine she had seen him looking at so covetously.

When there was a silent moment, “I’ll bring it back.”

Ghislaine looked up from her pacing, hand still on her chin, brow still furrowed. “What?”

“I think I know who took that figurine.” _I_ know _I know_. “I’ll go get it back.”

“Belle…” Solène’s voice petered off into a tinny creak, her eyes daring from Ghislaine to Belle, and back to Ghislaine.

But Ghislaine nodded firmly, striding over to clasp her youngest sister’s shoulder. “Alright. But be mindful. If you’re wrong, they may be offended. If you’re right…” Her face twisted. “Be careful.”

Belle smiled up at her. “I will.”

Belle had never made the trip to that house on foot before; it had always been in a carriage. And it wasn’t too often that she’d made the trip at all, either. Her father was great friends with the master of the house, but the boy… Well, everyone knew that Belle did not get on with the boy. Everyone knew—or so she liked to think—that this was not Belle’s fault.

She’d never made the trip to that house on foot before, but she thought it would likely be quicker if she left the house via the back garden. As she stepped down onto the lawn, her heart constricted, a hard knot forming in her throat.

The roses had had their first bloom early this year, and the young spring green of the garden was interspersed with bursts of yellow and pink and pale scarlet. Their sweet perfume suffused the air, blanketing over the considerably less pleasant odors wafting on the breeze from the city center. For as long as Belle could remember, this garden had been her refuge. She had played hide-and-seek in the bushes, hardly caring for the way the thorns pricked her flesh. It had been her place to go think when she needed quiet. She had sat here and chatted with her friends over a cup of tea or chocolate.

 _I don’t want to leave._ Belle paused to pluck a few brown, sodden leaves from the icy waters of the birdbath. The way the chill bit into her hand was entirely too welcome. _I don’t want to leave. I just want to stay here._

But this house was no longer hers. In so short a time that it felt like a flash, there would be other people living in it. There would be no place for her here, in what had once been her home.

As Belle made the walk over to that house, her pulse quickened in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. She felt giddy; she felt sick. Her hands itched to take a lock of her hair and wind it so tight against her left forefinger that her scalp would ache, but the long training and exasperated voice of her old governess returned to her, and she restrained herself from that. It betrayed a lack of lady-like poise, after all. She clenched the pale blue fabric of her skirt, instead. It was already wrinkled; no one would notice a few more.

The house whose front gate she unlatched was much like that one that, for just a little longer, Belle called home. It dwelled in a nice neighborhood, was large but no rival to the riverside palaces of the elite, and had an air of energy that completely outstripped those palaces, anyways. Belle thought the bushes that lined the walkway were a touch overgrown; her skirt snagged on a branch at one point and she had to work to get it free.

This was the last time she’d have to deal with him. That should have made it easier to walk up the steps and knock on the door. Instead, Belle hesitated for what felt like an eternity, her hand trained over the brass door knocker, whose mustachioed face sneered up at her. Only after telling herself that it was more likely that his father or one of the servants would answer the door was she finally able to curl her hand around the knocker—so cold despite the sun that had emerged from behind fluffy, gray-white clouds; it didn’t retain heat at all—and rap it hard, once, twice, three times, against the plate.

But the door swung open immediately, and with it died her hopes. Not an old man or a servant stood on the other side, but a young man just Belle’s age, who leaned on the doorframe and looked at her out of hooded eyes appraisingly.

Géraud had a face that those who didn’t know him might have called pleasant: fine jaw and cheekbones, sharp nose, full lips, arched brows and wide, dark eyes. His expressions were highly changeable, though the ones Belle knew best were a dark scowl and a thin, watchful smile that absorbed distress with relish. Belle didn’t know what he did for work. She didn’t know that he worked at all. In his father’s place, she wouldn’t have trusted him with business affairs.

It was Géraud who broke the silence. “Come to say goodbye?” he asked in a low voice. He didn’t offer for her to come inside. He didn’t step back out of the doorway; he didn’t advance. He just… stood there, as if willing Belle to step into range but unwilling to invite such a response.

That was not worth answering. “I believe you have something of ours,” Belle told him instead, imitating Ghislaine’s crispest, most business-like tone of voice.

Géraud shook his head sharply, but that appraising look never left his eyes. “I don’t think so.”

“At the auction?” Belle pressed, though not as far as she could have (Not as far as she would have liked to).

His eyes widened slightly, though there was no effort, none that Belle could see, to pretend at hurt or offense. “Are you calling me a liar?”

 _Your mouth is moving. Words are coming out of it_. Remembering what had happened the last time she had tried such a tack with him, Belle affixed a frozen smile to her face and tried a different one. “It’s possible it may have been mislabeled. It is a figurine of a giraffe, about a foot tall?”

He shrugged his shoulders, a slow, unhurried rolling gesture. “It’s possible that I saw something like that. I don’t know how it was labeled, not exactly…” He trailed off, continuing to stare at Belle with that even, assessing look in his eyes.

The days when she could be goaded into speech by his silence were long past. Belle stared back, and waited.

“Do you still fuss over spiders?” he asked suddenly, a lopsided smile twisting his mouth and a bright gleam entering his eyes. “Still take them out into your little garden?”

Belle’s smile curdled on her lips; a sudden torrent of words came roaring up in the back of her throat. She blinked, and behind her eyes she saw a little boy in her back garden, slowly and methodically pulling the legs off of a large, fuzzy brown spider, one by one by one. It twitched feebly in the boy’s unyielding grasp, and sometimes Belle imagined she could hear it screaming, but that wasn’t the spider she remembered screaming. It was her cat.

Géraud tilted his head to one side, a pensive frown stealing over his lips now. “And that little hovel you’re moving to, where is it?”

He waited very patiently for an answer; Belle would give him that. He could be patient when it suited him to be. But finally, Géraud heaved a sigh and disappeared back into the house, not even bothering to close the door. Belle did not follow him inside.

And she didn’t have long to wait, anyhow. Géraud reappeared barely a minute later. He thrust the figurine into Belle’s hands— _“Here.”_ —and slammed the door so hard the nearest window rattled in its frame.

Belle let out a harsh, whistling breath as she looked the figurine over. This morning, it had been pristine, clean and smooth and highly-polished. Now, it was visibly scratched and scuffed, a chunk of wood missing from one of the giraffe’s sides, the wound bristling with splinters.

“Did he drag it behind him on the street?” Belle muttered to herself, before shaking her head and starting out for home. Some things here, she would not miss.


	2. Chapter Two

Belle had never really considered how much labor went in to keeping a house of any size in an orderly state. Her days had been spent reading, or playing instruments, or embroidering, or helping Solène entertain guests, or in the company of her friends. Though she had spent a fair amount of time at home, she’d never really paid much attention to the amount of work the household servants did on a daily basis. Their housekeeper had overseen the servants, and their housekeeper reported to Ghislaine (And Solène, on the occasions—and there were many—when Ghislaine was working with their father). Belle had thought it better to just let them get on with it, and not get in their way.

But it was, you know. A lot of sweaty, achy, thankless work.

The Merchant’s estimate had been correct: it had taken them weeks to get to the house he’d found in the country, when traveling with heavily-laden wagons. It had taken weeks, and by the time they got there the weather had turned from the balmy warmth of spring (with cold nights and chilly dawns) to a sticky, cloying heat that never abated under moon or sun, that no breeze could relieve, that harbored a million buzzing insects. By the time they got there, Belle’s skin was more covered in bumps than it had been since she was thirteen, when she had had her first (and mercifully _last_ ) bout of acne.

It was mostly quiet, on the journey; the family had little to say to one another. The Merchant was in charge of the wagons, but when one of those became stuck in the mud it inevitably fell to at least two of his daughters (sometimes all three) to get the wagon out of the mud and back on course. He was not a young man and his back painted him at the best of times—and sleeping on the ground with only a thin pallet between body and earth was _not_ “the best of times.” But Ghislaine and Solène began to mutter about it after a few days, and Belle had to remind herself of her father’s infirmities to keep the same sentiments out of her mind. Convincing her sisters to let go of those same sentiments was somewhat more difficult; she suspected they capitulated primarily to please her.

All of that, and they had arrived as night was falling, to find an old, battered, ramshackle house on the very edge of a vast forest, a house two stories tall with a cellar hewn roughly from the hard earth. There were no holes in the walls or the roof, but that was just about the only mercy afforded to them. One of the windows into the ground floor (made up of a kitchen area and, beyond that, just an empty space with an ash-clogged fireplace) was missing its shutters. As there was no glass over any of those windows, the rough wooden boards that made up the floor were stained in many places, slightly mildewed in others, and was strewn all about with dead leaves and brittle pine needles. There was also evidence that some sort of animal might have a nest somewhere in the house, but there was no use checking until morning. (Belle suspected she was going to be spending a great deal of time trapping spiders and putting them outside.)

As for the furnishings the Merchant had mentioned, there were rather _less_ of them than there should have been. The kitchen had a stove and an oven and a hearth for a cook fire, never fear, but there were only two chairs around the kitchen table—“It’s just as well that we brought ours!” the Merchant said rather too brightly, to be met with a glare from Ghislaine and silence from Solène and Belle. The bedframes they found upstairs were rickety, splintered, and empty; no mattresses to be found there.

Already aching and tired and longing for anything even remotely soft to lie on, it was only with the utmost reluctance that Belle rolled out her pallet on the cleanest patch of floor she could find and lied down. She winced as her sore, tense back touched against unyielding wood. The dark, dense forest loomed up behind the house, and its many noises filled Belle’s ears, so loud that she couldn’t even hear her father snoring as she shut her eyes.

Forest… There had been something about forests, something she thought or felt. But only a wakeful mind could remember that, and Belle soon fell into a fitful sleep.

-0-0-0-

But about the work, the sweaty, achy, thankless work.

Their father, the first few days they were living in their new house, occupied himself with selling their dray horses (the better to acquire money for things like food and _mattresses_ ) and trying to determine whether there was any work in the village for a man with his skillset. This saw him out of the house and into the nearby village for virtually all of the daylight hours, and his daughters? This left his daughters with their work cut out for them.

Belle stared helplessly at the fireplace, at the mound of ash piled high on the hearth and spilling over onto the floor. “What do you use to clean ash out of a fireplace?” she muttered, almost to herself, though loudly enough that one of her sisters was bound to hear her.

As she was carrying another sheet full of leaves out towards the back door, Ghislaine paused and nodded to the shovel propped up against the wall. “We would need an ash rake, but we—“ her hands clenched over the edges of the sheet “—don’t have one at present.” Their ash rake had been stolen during the auction. This house hadn’t had one when they entered it. “Use the shovel to get the greater part of the ash out. What’s left, we’ll sweep out with the broom.”

That sounded simple enough. Belle began scooping ash out of the fireplace onto the sheet set aside for getting it out of the house. A cloud of dust billowed out from the fireplace, and Belle immediately regretted the massive oversight that had led to her not tying a rag over her mouth and nose, let alone the fact that she had nothing with which to shield her eyes. She staggered backwards, the shovel falling to the floor with a clatter as she coughed and gagged, struggling to spit out the foul ash that clogged in her mouth.

It was only when her wheezing began to subside somewhat that Belle noticed Solène rubbing her back in a gentle, circular motion. Solène held out an old handkerchief to her, one large enough for Belle to tie around her face. “It works better when you have this,” she murmured, and if she was too exhausted to effect real joviality, her voice was at least warm.

Belle mopped ashy sweat from her brow with one hand, nodded gratefully to her sister, and took the handkerchief so she could get on with this.

Tracking down the animals (it turned out to be a family of squirrels) living in their new home and getting them _out_ had been a three-woman job. When it came time to figure out how to clean the floors (and walls), this was initially a _zero_ -woman job, seeing as none of them knew what to do. So that meant going into the village to find someone to ask, and that meant Ghislaine and Solène were both looking expectantly at Belle.

“I wouldn’t even know how to ask!” Belle protested, eyes darting pleadingly from Ghislaine, then to Solène, who’d be more likely to let her stay here anyways.

“You just go up to someone, introduce yourself, and ask how to get mildew off of wood,” Ghislaine reasoned. “It’s simple. Try asking one of the shopkeepers; they’re probably more used to strangers asking them questions.”

There was no good reason for Belle to insist that one of them go instead, nothing she could think of to say that didn’t make her sound like a child, hopelessly vain, both, or something even worse. She looked down at the skirt of her dress, dirty as it was. They were only wearing their plainest dresses when they worked, but even those were dresses that were never _meant_ to be worn while doing the kind of work that went into getting a filthy house clean again. The dress was ruined, the dirt and grime was ground in too deep, Belle would never be able to wear it for anything but this kind of work again, and she didn’t want to go meeting people for the first time dressed like _this_. But her sisters were both looking at her expectantly, they didn’t have time for her to wash up and find something clean to wear, and Belle didn’t know how to ask. She wasn’t even entirely sure what to ask for.

She did, at least, splash water over her face and wash her hands before she left. But nothing else. She didn’t have time.

Belle had been on her feet more hours in the day over the past few days than she had been in her entire life leading up to this point. Even when she attended balls, she’d not been on her feet so much; even when she’d had dancing lessons as a little girl, she’d had more time to sit and rest her feet than she did now. Her feet ached and her heels were more blistered than they had ever gotten when breaking in new winter boots. The walk to the village saw her struggling to hold her head up straight and keep from limping; surroundings that she would later recognize as pleasant (rolling green hills given over to farmers’ fields and sheep and goat pastures) barely registered to her as she watched the hard packed earthen path for mud puddles and pot holes, and tried in vain to ignore the dull stabs of pain in her feet.

The village was… Well, to call it a hamlet would have been unfair. There were far too many buildings and far too many people for that. But Belle had lived all her life in a large, bustling city, a center of culture and commerce, and anything smaller was going to look _tiny_ compared to it. Belle didn’t count the buildings as she walked down the last hill into the valley where the village nestled. It might not have been a village at all; it could well have been a town. But it was considerably smaller than the city where Belle had been born, and thus was quickly filed away in her mind as a village.

The buildings were constructed of a mix of white-washed wood and rust-red brick, and were possessed primarily of arched and gabled roofs, though a small few of them were flat. Most of the roofs were shingled, but some of the smaller buildings (at least one of which was a stable) had thatched roofs. One of the buildings had an eye-catching roof of canary yellow tile that Belle couldn’t help but stop and stare at for a few moments, curious, very much in spite of herself, about the building’s purpose and its inhabitants. She tore her eyes away from it with some difficulty and instead focused on the rest of the town.

What she noticed first, beyond the general shapes of the buildings, was the air. It was cleaner here, did not smell of sweat and horse and excrement the way many of the streets in the center of the city had. Oh, there were certain odors here, and not all of them were pleasant, but gentler smells like flowers’ perfume and soap could be picked up, and what was predominant was the green smell of grass, carrying far past the point where the grass no longer grew. It was something. Belle was scarcely willing to credit it, for a more pleasant smell did not make up for it not being her home, but it was certainly something.

What she noticed next was that the streets were wider here, and were not paved. They were hard packed and well-graded, so that, though they were a touch muddy from a recent rainfall, they weren’t rendered a sucking mire. The cars drawn by horses and oxen had no trouble with it. There seemed also to be no distinction between parts of the streets for carts, and parts of the streets for foot traffic; it was positively hair-raising to watch children dart in and out of the path of those carts, but no one but her seemed to think anything of it.

And most of the people here were wearing cleaner clothes than her. They were thinner, clearly didn’t enjoy prosperous enough lives to grow healthily plump, but they were cleaner than she was. Belle couldn’t help but notice that. It was difficult, once she noticed, to think of anything else.

There was a moment, a long moment, when Belle wanted nothing more than to go back to their new house, head straight to their new wash tub, fill it up with water, and take a long, thorough bath, miserably cold bathwater or not. Anyone she spoke to was going to think she’d been raised in a cave. By cave wolves.

She couldn’t go back until she’d found out how to get mildew off of wood. Belle moved forwards, looking for a shop—preferably a shop of the sort that gave the impression that the shopkeeper might have the answers she was looking for. She’d have to give up on making any _impressions_ of her own that weren’t at least somewhat humiliating.

Belle walked down the streets at a slower pace than she would have employed in a place she knew well, careful to stay away from the middle where all the carts were. She didn’t talk to anyone she passed, though if someone nodded to her, she nodded back.

Eventually, Belle spotted a sign reading ‘SOAP AND CANDLES.’ She wondered, briefly, whether the country’s trade guilds had any presence in the village, or whether this place was just too small to warrant attention. She distinctly remembered that, in the city, the soap-making guild and the candle-making guild had been two distinct guilds, and that soapers and chandlers were categorically _not_ allowed to infringe on each other’s business and customers. She remembered this because there had been a rather heated dispute three years ago when a candle maker had done just that, and things had gotten, well… As far as Belle knew, they’d managed to get the bloodstains scrubbed off the courtroom floor eventually. And the broken bones had healed. Eventually.

No signs of carnage past or present could be discerned outside of the perfectly normal looking shop, and standing outside, Belle couldn’t make out any signs of disorder. She _did_ note that this shop had glass windows, and wondered briefly if there was a glazier in town, or if the windows were imported. Either way, it looked as if soapers (and chandlers) made good money here. After a moment to steel herself, she crossed the threshold into the shop, and looked around.

The shopkeeper was not immediately visible, and Belle, admittedly a little curious, looked around her. The candles were definitely tallow and not beeswax; they had the decidedly… _strong_ smell to them that had always made Belle wrinkle her nose and turn away. The soap, on the other hand, was more difficult to decide on. In a place like this, Belle wasn’t certain a soaper, no matter how much money they made, would be able to get their hands on olive oil, at least not enough to make a living making soap from it. But at the same time, the soap out for sale didn’t smell of tallow, and it left Belle wondering if there was a third material for soap-making that she just didn’t know about.

After the smell, what she focused on was the soaps themselves. When she lived in the city, it had never been her duty to buy soap for the house, but she had noticed that the soaps themselves came in a great variety of shapes. In addition to the basic circular, square, and rectangular, there had been soaps carved into the shape of seashells, into the shape of roses and lilies and a great many other flowers, hearts and butterflies. They had also occasionally had designs painted on; the most popular was the crest of the lord of the city, and a hummingbird poised over a lily.

Nearly all of the soap in this store was white and somewhat pearly-looking. The vast majority was fashioned into rectangular bricks, but there were some that were instead carved into thin, circular discs. There were a few bricks closer to the counter that were, rather than white and pearly, pale, sea-foam green and opaque, and Belle couldn’t help but notice that these seemed to be significantly more expensive than the white soap, and that they smelled of sweet bay. Interesting.

Then, there were footfalls on the stairs and a tall, dark-skinned woman in a yellow dress coming down with a “Be right with you!” out of her mouth, and Belle went from absorbing her surroundings with grudging interest right back to nauseating self-consciousness. The fact that this woman looked as if she’d never had a hair out of place in her life didn’t help matters.

When the woman finished attending to her business (which happened to be putting a sign up in the windowsill), she turned to Belle with an expectant gleam in her bright brown eyes. Belle opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, that expectant gleam turned to one of surprise (one that—and thank you for small mercies—did not rake over Belle’s dirt-streaked dress), and Belle was greeted with a not quite unfriendly, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

Belle fixed what she hoped was a winning smile to her face and nodded, inclining her knees slightly in a half-curtsey. “No, madame. My family is new to this place. We first came here a few days ago.”

The woman nodded thoughtfully, her eyes narrowing. “You’re one of the ones who moved into the house out near the forest, aren’t you?”

“Yes, madame. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Hmm.” The woman—a soaper, or someone who employed soapers, perhaps—pursed her lips. “I suppose you should know soon as possible: you shouldn’t go into the forest.”

This conversation was not taking the turn Belle had expected it to, though she saw no way to steer it back without giving offense. And she supposed it would be good to at least discover _why_. “And why is that?”

The woman shrugged. “There’s a monster in the woods.”

Belle’s face screwed up, in spite of herself. “A _monster_?”

“Or so a hunter said, about, oh, eight, nine years ago.” She snorted, looking away. “He could have been drunk. And as it stands, he left town and joined the army going on five years ago now, so you can hardly _ask_ him. Anyways—“ she fixed her eyes on Belle’s face again “—a reason you certainly shouldn’t enter the forest is that there aren’t any roads and it’s entirely too easy to get lost in there.”

“I’ll… keep that in mind.” She’d keep in mind that it _did_ sound very much like the sort of local folktale that got started by the ramblings of the town drunk. The point about there being no roads and, apparently, no distinguishing features _was_ worth keeping in mind.

This earned her a brisk nod. “Excuse me for not introducing myself earlier. My name is Bérengère; I’m the town soaper—and chandler,” Bérengère added, as an afterthought. “And you are?”

Now, she was back on somewhat more solid ground. “My name is Belle. You may have met my father already; he was trying to sell our cart horses in town.”

“I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.” And that smooth tone of neutrality was welcome, so welcome; it might have been a pleasure or not been a pleasure, and the tone gave nothing away, gave nothing to foment uncertainty. “A man looking to sell horses would not have occasion to enter this shop.” She raised an eyebrow. “Are you looking to buy?”

There was a hook, one Belle knew she was going to have to heed sooner or later (Sooner. It was certainly ‘sooner.’). “I was hoping you could answer a question of mine.”

She would take as a good sign the fact that Bérengère’s face did not immediately grow closed-off or hostile. It meant there was still a chance Belle would actually learn what she needed to know. “And what kind of question is that?”

It was less of an effort, this time, for Belle to pin a winning smile to her mouth. It was easier to be a supplicant. “I am uncertain how long it has been since our new house was last occupied; Father never told me. But it has clearly been unoccupied for a long time, and we’ve run into problems. I was wondering if you knew of any way to get mildew off of wood.”

The skeptical, unflatteringly-surprised look that stole over Bérengère’s face was not a hook so much as it was a needle plunging into Belle’s flesh, a pinpoint of scalding, humiliated pain. “You mean to tell me that you and your family have lived so long without ever learning to clean your own house properly?”

To give this woman, barely more than a stranger, the full truth required more of Belle than she was willing to give. She wasn’t yet at the point where she was comfortable flaying herself open for the satisfaction of a near-stranger. “This particular problem never became an issue for us.” She couldn’t remember if their maids had ever had to clean mildew off of any of the walls or the furniture. She’d never seen any evidence of mildew in their old home.

Judging by the way Bérengère raised one well-plucked eyebrow, it seemed as if something about Belle’s explanation didn’t sit well with her. “It’s a simple solution. You just get some vinegar, pour it over the affected area, wait a few hours, then clean the vinegar away. The vinegar will kill any mildew.”

“Thank you very much.” And because making a good impression was more important for the family than the way the soaper’s condescension stung, “I’d like to buy a bar of soap, if you please.”

-0-0-0-

“So you were able to get mutton?”

Mutton had never been Ghislaine’s favorite meat. Belle vaguely remembered being a small child and watching Ghislaine argue with a woman who was either their mother or their nurse about the merits of the meat—and despite being a young child, Belle clearly remembered Ghislaine arguing quite vehemently that mutton had _no_ merit.

Mutton had never been Ghislaine’s favorite meat, so when her tone of voice when Solène came back to their house with a cut of mutton in her hands was something that bordered on _hope_ , Belle couldn’t help but look up from the patch of floor she’d been trying to sweep, brow furrowed in deep, _deep_ confusion.

Their father had always known how to drive a good bargain, and those skills had come in handy when it had come to selling the dray horses. He’d made quite a bit of money selling those horses, though once the required portion had been set aside to go towards the portion of his debts still in need of paying off, and once the things that had been missing from their house were paid for, there wasn’t that much left over. It was enough to start out with, though, and their father had found work in the village as well. (Ghislaine had been talking about, once they got the house _truly_ fit for habitation again, finding work as well. Belle would have been irritated at the thought of being relegated to staying in the house and just keeping it clean all the time as if she was some sort of maid, if she wasn’t relieved that she wouldn’t have to field the potential curiosity and condescension of the locals.)

The food situation had been… interesting. Solène, always one to err on the side of caution where food was concerned, had bought quite a bit more in the way of foodstuffs than they had needed for their journey here (The other part of why, or at least so Solène told Belle, was that it had been less expensive to buy some of the things she’d found in the quantities that she had). The issue there was that food that could stay fresh for weeks… typically wasn’t terribly good. They’d had a great wealth of hardtack and sausage and jerky and jars of pickles (the pickled eggs had vanished very quickly) and blocks of cheese only slightly softer than granite. Asides from sausages and pickles, none of these were foods Belle was terribly fond of, and even the sausages and the pickles had started to wear on her after a while. (She often caught herself wishing Solène had thought to get a couple of jars of pickled herring.)

By the time they got here, Belle would have killed for a piece of fresh fruit, might even have been persuaded to tolerate persimmons if that was the price she had to pay for something _fresh_ to sink her teeth into. But arriving at their new house had not heralded the arrival of fresh food. They were, after all, without anything but the slightest amount of money for the first several days as their father ted to sell their horses. They had very little money with which to buy anything, and plenty of travel food left over from the journey.

They were all sick of food that would probably last until the end of time, provided it was stored somewhere dry and cool. Hence, most likely, Ghislaine’s actually being hopeful at the sight of mutton. Oh, how things change.

Solène nodded with something like enthusiasm as she put her parcels down on the kitchen table. There was a cut of mutton and, Belle noted, carrots, turnips, and two onions. “It’s not the best cut of mutton in the world; I, uh…” Her face colored slightly. “…I didn’t have the money for that. But it did come with a marrow bone, so I thought we could make stew.”

Ghislaine wiped her hands against her soiled skirt. “That sounds good to me.”

Out of a sudden need to be mildly perverse, Belle asked them, “Do any of us actually know how to make stew?”

“You get water in a cauldron, put it over a cook fire, and add your ingredients.” And Solène’s note of cheer was almost completely convincing in its sincerity. “How difficult can it be?”

Out of a persistent need to be mildly perverse, “And how long does it take to make?”

This only got her a pair of blank looks.

-0-0-0- 

And once the interior of the house was dealt with, there was still the yard _outside_ to deal with.

When the family arrived here, it had been clear that the house had not been occupied in some time. The very state of the interior suggested at that, and it had taken some time to finally get it clean enough to live comfortably in—more time than it would have taken someone who had actually been raised learning how to clean a house and _keep_ it clean, though they had gotten there eventually.

No one had lived here in a long time, and no one had maintained the grounds in just as long a time, it seemed. The grass in the yard was overgrown and choked with weeds and briar, and Ghislaine had stumbled upon a wasp’s1 nest in a small hole at the edge of the property and been laid up for two days recovering from the stings. What had clearly once been the house’s vegetable garden (if for no other reason than because of the dilapidated fence sectioning it off from the rest of the yard) was in just as poor a condition. There were no more vegetables growing there, but there were plenty of thistles, a great multitude of pigweed, and one large, incredibly stubborn gorse bush.

There were flowers here, and none of them were the roses Belle missed.

The yard was a mess, the vegetable garden was an even bigger mess, and to get it neat again required many hours of labor on the ground in the sun.

Belle winced as the red, blistered skin on her left arm cracked when she reached out to yank a weed out of the ground. In the city, she’d rarely spent more than about half an hour at a time in the sun. On the way here, she had been mostly sitting in a covered wagon, and had had a broad-brimmed hat to protect her face from the sun. But there was no avoiding the sun out here, and Belle was discovering something about her body. Namely, what she was discovering was that her pale skin burned in the sun very, _very_ easily. It didn’t look like she was tanning either, and Belle didn’t know whether to be grateful for that. She was relieved not to wind up with tanned skin, but if her skin was just as pale under the peeling sunburn, then it would burn again, and likely just as easily.

She tried yanking out weeds a little faster, just to get this over with sooner. And then remembered that they were planning to use the vegetable garden for its original purpose so that they could grow food of their own, and that that would inevitably entail yet more hours out in the sun. Belle bit back a curse.

A few feet away, sweat visibly dripping down her face and onto the front of her dress, Solène sighed and winced as a spiny weed scratched against her arm. “Someone will remember us eventually,” she said, with more conviction than she had managed for anything else since they arrived here. “One of our friends will invite us to stay with them until this is all over. You’ll see.”

“One would hope,” Ghislaine agreed, growling under her breath as she attacked one of the larger thistles with a hoe. “After all the times we’ve helped them, one would hope they would return the favor now.”

Belle said nothing.

How many of their friends had spread gossip and rumors about how it had really been their own vanity and extravagance that had brought their family to ruin? How many times had Belle entered a room to hear silence erupt into whispering, or conversation fall into silence? How many times had she felt mocking looks lance her skin?

She didn’t expect to hear anything from them. She didn’t expect to hear anything from anyone. It wasn’t nice to say. She didn’t want to start a fight. She said nothing, and hoped for nothing.

After close to a month like this, just as it was becoming unbearable to keep her silence, her sisters learned to hope for nothing, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: The species of wasp known as Vespula germanica, the German yellowjacket.


	3. Chapter Three

Life… moved on, though in some respects Belle rather wished it hadn’t. Life and time did not care for the objections of those subject to them; you could only try to adjust to their whims. Or so Belle was learning, and trying to come to terms with.

Though it had previously seemed an impossible task, the sisters eventually managed to both get the house clean and establish a means of _keeping_ it clean that wouldn’t have them scrubbing and sweeping all the day long, along with getting and keeping the yard neat. They plied their labor to growing vegetables in the vegetable garden, hoping they’d have enough of a surplus to sell, but the hard earth yielded up little in the way of results, and everything they grew went to the cookpots and the cellar for storage. The soil this close to the forest was just too poor, or so the local farmers said when Belle went to them for their advice.

Lumpy mattresses and uninteresting food and long days of labor, this was Belle’s life, now. She learned, however slowly, how to wash clothes and bed linens properly. She and her sisters learned how to cook food in a way that produced something both edible and (reasonably) palatable. They all adjusted to having to go everywhere they went on foot, all the time, and adjusted to this new, isolated life of theirs, without the diversions they had previously enjoyed.

Adjusted at their own pace, anyways.

When the hope that their friends would retrieve them from exile failed them, Ghislaine and Solène responded rather less quietly than had Belle. It was inevitable, she supposed. Things had been… difficult, and on top of that, Ghislaine had a keen mind for business and a temper not inclined to restrain its tongue when angered.

There were many arguments to smooth over, for a while, most of them centering on recklessness and the dangers of putting all of one’s eggs into one basket. Occasionally there came the much more difficult to smooth over (not least because Belle herself had to swallow back bile upon hearing it) arguments about extravagance, about fine food and balls and jewelry and dresses. It was always someone else’s fault, _always_ someone else’s fault, and even Belle’s utmost efforts at conciliation left everyone involved (sometimes, herself continued) simmering and balancing on a knife’s edge for days, barely able to speak to each other and letting the creaking of the house fill in the silence instead. Belle swallowed back bile, swallowed back retorts, swallowed back everything until it felt as if her chest had been filled with lava, and let the creaking of the house replace what screamed in the back of her mind.

But they all adjusted to it. They had no choice, after all; there was nothing in the world capable of turning back time and letting anyone undo their mistakes.

-0-0-0-

Well, selling what they grew with blood and sweat and tears (and a remarkably smaller amount of soil, water, and sunlight involved in the process) out of the earth had met with abject failure. But necessity dictated that they find other work, and life in the city had left them prepared in that regard, at least.

Belle’s father was a merchant, but his skills did not lie solely in the business of procuring and selling goods from distant lands. Every household in the village was required to pay their taxes to the local magistrate, and every business was required, on top of paying their taxes, to furnish an accurate picture of their finances—fraud was not looked upon kindly. The village did not enjoy a surplus of accountants—the last one had quit their home and headed for the nearest city a couple of years ago—and the accounting skills of the locals, well… We could be generous and call those skills limited. Ghislaine was something closer to honest and remarked upon the fact that this was the sort of place that seemed to regard the ability to balance a ledger an _advanced_ skill. Belle would… take her word for it.

The Merchant and his eldest daughter found no shortage of work for themselves in the village as makeshift accountants (They hadn’t taken any formal exams, couldn’t actually _call_ themselves accountants). They’d never become _rich_ doing the work they were doing—a portion of the family’s income must needs be devoted towards paying off their debt and the debt’s interest, and moreover, the villagers wouldn’t have been willing to retain their services if they’d actually charged the true _value_ of their services. But it was a living, one that kept the family from falling further into poverty, one that allowed them to form a connection of a sort with the village.

They were a bit of an oddity in the village, once the villagers became truly aware of who they were, where they had come from, and why they were here. It was months before Belle stopped getting stares when she walked into the village while running errands, and even after that, there were still moments when there would be a… something in their face when they caught sight of her. A gleam in their eyes or a quirk of their lip, a burning curiosity to ask questions, but once there was no longer any condescension in it, Belle found the curiosity was much easier to bear.

(There was pity in their eyes, sometimes. Belle found she didn’t mind the pity nearly as much as she could have. Pity was… Pity was something humans needed. It could be a balm to many hurts, even if only superficially so.)

They were a bit of an oddity, but over time, they became an accepted oddity. Every community of any size had its odd ducks. So long as they did no harm, odd ducks were simply something that added a bit of color to a bland landscape.

Belle had no suitors here. Neither did her sisters. She wasn’t certain what Ghislaine and Solène thought of that; they’d all been so busy that there was hardly time for romance or dealing with young people trying to go about the business of courting them. She had no admirers here, no one who vied for her attention or her favor or her hand. The idea filled her with an odd relief. She wasn’t what she had been, either in body or in mind. And she just… She was glad to be left alone. She didn’t want to contend with a suitor now, didn’t want to have to greet their attentions with a sweet smile or a patient tone. She didn’t want that at all.

-0-0-0-

The list of things Belle missed about her life in the city far outweighed the things she didn’t miss.

She didn’t miss Géraud. She didn’t miss the powerful odor that the wind could carry from the city center. She didn’t miss crowds pressing in on her or the fact that she could never enjoy true silence even in her own home, for there was always some sort of noise nearby. She didn’t miss the gossips that it felt as if fully half the city had revealed themselves to be by the end.

She missed her bed. She missed the rose garden behind their house. She missed the food she had eaten and the books she had read. She missed her virginal, her lute, her flute. She missed the view from her bedroom window and missed the people she had called her friends, in spite of the way they had deserted her at the end (Her heart was weak to loved ones. That much, she knew). She missed the cobblestone paths she had walked down, missed the roads she had ridden down in their carriage, missed the coffeehouses and the restaurants and the public squares. She missed the shops she had frequented and the smell of spices she would never taste again and the glimmering marble façade of the courthouse, and so many other things that she would never be able to list, for she felt their absence far more keenly than their presence.

Over the past few months, Belle had lost a great deal of weight. No longer did she look in a mirror (a scratched, warped thing now, not the pristine mirror she had had in the city) and see a healthily plump young woman looking back at her. She had worked more with her hands and the strength of her body more over the past few months than she had in her entire life, and had on top of that had rather less to eat. She was always hungry, it felt like, and she’d grown scrawny like she hadn’t been since she had been a young teenager, going through a massive growth spurt and growing several inches over the course of just three months.

The calluses on her hands from playing her instruments had been eradicated by the coarse, thick calluses you inevitably pick up when you spend all day, every day, engaged in manual labor. It was such a jarring sight, whenever she looked at her hands; she kept expecting to see those smaller calluses, and saw the larger ones instead, blooming red and shiny across her pale skin. Her hair was constantly frizzy from the greater humidity here; her face was pinched and slightly drawn.

If Belle had been offered some avenue back to her old life, something that didn’t require abandoning her honor, she would have accepted in a heartbeat. But.

But she had developed an appreciation for rolling green hills. She’d developed an appreciation for the sight of sheep being herded by their shepherds. She’d developed an appreciation for hearing only the sounds of the nearby forest at night when she was trying to sleep. It was greener here than it had ever been in the city. The earth was more alive, allowed to spawn whatever it chose rather than being smothered by iron and stone. Belle breathed fresh, clean air, and was almost intoxicated by how much more alive the air felt here than it had in the place where she had dwelled all her life. It felt as if there was something massive and primordial sleeping beneath the surface of the earth, and its drowsing breaths were the stimulus for all life here.

Sometimes, as the sun was falling red and black and bleeding over the western horizon, Belle would go to the back door of her new home and stare out into the forest that loomed so close that they found themselves completely in shadow by the middle of the afternoon. She thought about what the soaper Bérengère had told her, about how there was supposed to be a monster in the woods. She didn’t believe that, but there was still something about that tall, dense, dark forest that drew the eye and only let it turn away with the utmost reluctance. She was just drawn to watch the shadows, like the earth was drawn to the orbit of the sun.


	4. Chapter Four

Three years the family spent in their new house in the country, until Belle had ceased thinking of it as her “new house,” and simply regarded it as her “house.” Three years, and Belle had had time to grow accustomed to this place, to become familiar with the way it cycled through the seasons. She had seen balmy springs and blazing, pitilessly humid summers, both of which were greener by far than anything she had ever enjoyed in the city. She had known autumns more vibrantly red and winters more vibrantly white than anything she had _ever_ enjoyed. She had grown accustomed to food whose only real savor was the labor that had gone into preparing it. She had grown accustomed to sleeping with a net over her bed, the better to keep out the flies.

Three years, and the only communication they had with the city was the occasional sending of money to the courts to go towards paying off the mountain of debt that had attached itself to them. They could have been dead to all the world beyond the village where the Merchant and Ghislaine worked.

Maybe it would have been better to… No, Belle didn’t know. She didn’t know about that.

What Belle did know was how fickle fortune could be, how quickly luck could turn, and just how much faith to put in either to steer you true.

It’s funny, isn’t it? The events that would change the course of Belle’s life forever, and it all started with something as small as a letter. She was in the village running errands for the family, and stopped by the post office on her way back home. Their country’s postal system was supposed to be the quickest and the most efficient in all the world, and all it ever gave to Belle and her family anymore were collection letters. Thick envelopes of oilcloth to keep the contents dry, and the garish red seal of the civil court emblazoned on the front left no doubt as to who had sent these letters, or why. They were about as cheerful as a funeral in a flood.

Belle went to the post office expecting to find a collection letter, if she found anything at all. And sure enough, there was a letter there, with the intended recipient—‘ _Edgar_ ’ was the name written there; they only ever sent the collection letters to her father—certainly being suggestive. But when she got a look at the envelope, she frowned, barely remembering to thank the postal worker who had retrieved it for her. The envelope wasn’t oilcloth; it was, instead, a thick, soft vellum parchment. And there was no garish red seal to be seen; instead, the envelope was held shut with sturdy blue yarn.

Belle walked home a bit more quickly than was her wont. Normally at this time of year, she would have wanted to drink in the sight of the verdant hills dotted with snowy lilies and sweetly pungent rosemary and (she could enjoy them from a distance, even if they had no place in her yard) towering purple thistles. She had few diversions out here; she had to find her satisfaction where she could. And if none of the flowers were roses, at least they were pleasing to the eye.

But this, this was the first letter any of her family had received in the past three years that wasn’t a collection letter from the court. She could not begin to imagine what it might say, but she knew how to find out.

 _I just hope it isn’t a message from a more private creditor. After everything else we’ve gone through, that would just be too much_.

The Merchant was not in the village today; of the two who worked there, only Ghislaine had appointments in the village today, and all of those might well be over by now. And sure enough, as Belle approached the house, she spied Ghislaine out front, hanging up sheets to dry.

Ghislaine brushed a stray lock of hair from her face (she’d tried time and time again to braid her hair, but with the way her hair curled, it always ended in failure) as Belle came towards her, and stood straight and still, frowning. “What’s your hurry?”

Belle stopped in her tracks, looking up at her sister with something like confusion squirming in her mind. “What?”

“Your face is all red,” Ghislaine pointed out. “It only ever gets like that if you’ve been running.”

The only thing to do was to hold up the letter she’d picked up at the post office. “This came for Father,” Belle explained. Ghislaine’s eyes widened slightly. “It’s not a collection letter, see? Where is he?”

Ghislaine almost rolled her eyes, but seemed to stop herself at the last moment. “Pestering Solène about supper, the last time I checked. Come on; let’s go show it to him.”

They rounded the house to get in through the back door, finding Solène in the kitchen, looking more than a little harried, but still very much alone. “He’s left me alone, at last,” Solène grumbled. “I told him over and over that it won’t get cooked any more quickly if he hovers, but none of it really took. He left because—I don’t know, I was focusing on something else, I think he may have gone to look over his ledgers? Tell him not to come back in here until supper is ready, will you please?”

Supper, or the main entrée of supper, anyways, was a meat pie Solène had learned to make from one of the women who lived in one of the farmsteads between their house and the village. It smelled, well, it smelled a bit greasier than Belle really cared for, but was still appetizing, especially considering how many hours it had been since she had last eaten. She could understand why her father would be hovering around in here, though she could unfortunately _also_ understand why Solène had that look on her face. “Try taking it as a compliment,” she suggested.

Solène let escape an uneven, jittery laugh. “I don’t think compliments are supposed to entail so much time getting underfoot. _Really_ , please tell him not to come back in here until I’m done. We’re going to have a rather nasty accident if I don’t have the space I need to work. Possibly involving fire.”

There would be plenty of time to tell Solène what the letter had said after their father had read it. If it turned out to be nothing of import, well, she wasn’t missing anything cooking away here in the kitchen.

They found their father sitting at the table at the far end of the ground floor, close to the hearth on that side of the house. The moment they’d gotten a table to sit there, he’d claimed it as a workspace, and Belle supposed it couldn’t be easy to do the kind of work he did sitting on the floor, though she wished that if he really _had_ to claim a spot for himself, it hadn’t been the spot with the best lighting on the ground floor. She needed all the light she could get when she was mending all of their clothes.

The Merchant’s mouth twisted in something close to a grimace as he saw his eldest and youngest daughters approaching him. “Tell your sister I won’t bother her in the kitchen any longer. Really, if she’s so bothered by it she should just say so. To me, preferably.”

Ghislaine shrugged. “I could say the same to you. You should tell Solène, if you want her to know you won’t be pestering her anymore.”

The look that passed between father and daughter was not a glare, but didn’t have much in the way of ease, either. It was all sharp eyes and tight lips and tighter jaws. The resemblance between the two of them was never so pronounced as it was when they looked at each other like that.

Belle squirmed a little as her father and eldest sister looked at each other in silence, the air growing more charged with each passing second. She never knew when something like this would escalate to an argument, when they would both decide, by silent and mutual agreement, to back down and be mannerly with one another again. She couldn’t remember the last time a full week went by without them _looking_ at each other like this and it got worse to be a bystander to every time and—

“Father, look!” Belle said brightly, and the jagged brittleness in her voice only caught on her throat a little bit. Only drew a few beads of blood. “Someone sent you a letter.” She held out the letter to him, inserting her hand into the empty space between the Merchant and Ghislaine’s sharp looks, and was only a little shocked when doing that did _not_ draw blood.

He didn’t even look at it. “Oh, yet another creditor; just set it down, Belle, I’ll look at it later.”

“I don’t think it’s a collection letter, Father. It has no seal on it, see?”

 _That_ got his attention. The Merchant looked away from Ghislaine to the letter, brows drawn together and eyes focusing in on the parchment envelope sharply. It wasn’t quite with a yank that he took the letter out of Belle’s hand, but Belle was still jerked forward, just a tad.

Blue thread fell to the table in a snaking heap. As he read the letter, the Merchant’s face paled. Belle watched with some alarm as if blanched paler, paler, paler, until it was white as the salt brought down out of the mountains.

She rounded the table, trying to get a better look at the letter. _Just another vulture, after all? Or is it some attempt at blackmail or extortion?_ Her blood ran hot at the thought. But before Belle’s eyes could focus on the letter’s contents, her father sprang up from his chair, slapping the letter facedown onto the table.

Belle gazed up at him, uncertainty etched into her brow. “Father?”

He looked in her direction, certainly, but Belle thought that the Merchant’s pale blue eyes were looking straight through her, rather than at her. She took a step back, suddenly afraid, however absurd such a fear might be, that he would walk straight into her on his way away from the table.

Similarly, Belle wasn’t certain it was actually her he was responding to when he said, in a decidedly strangled voice, “I’ve… I’ve got to make plans. Got to…” He strode over to the door, legs slightly wobbly. Retrieving his hat from the coatrack, the Merchant crammed it down lopsidedly onto his head. “Got to see about buying a horse. Or borrowing one. Or—whatever.” In a tone that acted as if it hardly mattered, “Watch the house while I’m gone, girls.”

And with that, he was out of the house, not even remembering to shut the door behind him.

Belle and Ghislaine stared at the door, dumbstruck.

“What was _that_ about?” Ghislaine let out with an incredulous laugh.

Belle worried at a loose thread on her sleeve cuff. “The letter, I suppose.”

“Yes, I can see _that_. I wonder what’s in it.”

Their eyes strayed to the tables and the slip of paper that laid on it. At the same time, Solène’s voice sounded from the kitchen: “He _left_? What’s going _on_ out there?”

At that, Belle and Ghislaine’s eyes met, and by silent and mutual agreement Belle took the letter and the two of them headed back into the kitchen. Solène eyed them somewhat warily as leaned against the wall near the oven. Voice inching upwards, “Is there something going on that I should know about?”

“This—“ Ghislaine gestured to the letter in Belle’s hand “—apparently makes for very interesting reading.”

“Well, let’s hear it, then.”

Herself, Belle was actually a little shocked that she’d gotten this far without either of her sisters snatching the letter out of her hand so they could read it themselves. But they were both looking at her with expressions of slightly impatient expectation, so she unfolded it and started to read aloud.

Very interesting reading, indeed.

_Edgar,_

_My friend, this letter must be brief. I am writing in great haste, and hope that it will reach you soon. The sooner, the better._

_One of your ships, the_ North Star, _has been sighted some two hundred miles south of here. The ship was damaged in the storm, but not destroyed as we thought. My agents report that the ship is bound for the port here. If the reports are to be believed, the_ North Star _still bears the majority of her cargo. The damage the ship sustained means that the_ North Star _will not be traveling quickly; if you hurry, you can be here in town when she docks._

_Yours in trust,_

_Jonah_

You could have heard a pin drop. Herself, Belle could scarcely breathe.

Once the silence broke, the house wasn’t calm again for quite some time.

-0-0-0-

The Merchant returned a little over an hour later, leading a sturdy but visibly graying horse kitted up with an old saddle and large feedbags. Despite his earlier eagerness, he didn’t even bother with supper as he hurried up to his room to pack.

They were saved. That was what was being sung up to the rafters, sung so high and so joyful that the boards of their house reverberated with hope. For even one of the Merchant’s ships to be recovered signaled the recovery of their wealth, for all three of the ships had been heavily laden with valuable goods, and selling them off would go a long way towards reestablishing the Merchant in the city and restoring his family to their former condition. It was so _close_ ; they could all practically taste it!

Well, three of them could practically taste it. Belle remained silent as the Merchant packed and her sisters talked excitedly amongst themselves, Ghislaine pacing and Solène fidgeting with the belt of her dress. She listened to it all, and their joy washed up on her skin and left marks there that struggled to worm their way into her mind, but could never manage to do so. Her heart was beating slowly, so slowly, and the only thing she could have said to any of them right now would have been unkind. Was it not unkind to take someone’s hopes and dash them to the ground? Herself, Belle could think of nothing crueler, and thus she kept her peace.

But really, this all felt just a bit too neat to her. They were all so sure this was the answer to all of their problems, and Belle felt as if she was the only one of them who remembered all the debt they still had to pay, all the interest that had accrued to that debt, and that their creditors would want the debts paid before the family saw a profit. That the courts would feel just the same way.

Maybe it would go better than she thought it would. After all, she wasn’t the one monitoring how much money they had left to pay, and she also had no idea just how heavily laden the _North Star_ was, nor how valuable the goods it carried were. And it wasn’t a sin to be optimistic, was it? It wasn’t a sin to hope that things would go better than they could, for once, was it?

Belle tried to force hope into her mind. Life here wasn’t as thoroughly unwelcome as it had once been, but she would welcome a chance to leave, welcome a chance to return to the life she had once enjoyed. Maybe this was the road back. Maybe.

It was around six o’clock when the Merchant was at last ready to leave, supper still having been disregarded. (Belle’s stomach growled, and she said not a word. There would be cold meat pie waiting for her when her father had left.) The sun was starting to sink towards the horizon, and though the sky was not painted with the vibrancy of sunset, the light had begun to take on a butter-golden cast, and the shadows cast by the forest were starting to turn from smoky-gray to black.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back here,” the Merchant was saying hurriedly, though his voice was lighter than it had been in months. “It may take a while to sort out the ship. I will try to return as soon as I can; I know you’ll all need me. Now, girls, is there anything you would like me to bring back from the city?”

“A new mattress for my bed,” Ghislaine supplied immediately, “one stuffed with down. That straw-stuffed monstrosity upstairs hasn’t been good for my back.”

The Merchant smiled easily at his eldest daughter; their difficulties had, for the moment, been forgotten. “I can certainly find a mattress in town. Solène?”

Solène was wringing her belt in her hands, a soft almost-giggle escaping her mouth. “It’s been ages since we had blancmange, hasn’t it? I’ve been longing for it for nearly two years now. You can’t get any of the moss you need to make it here; I’ve looked everywhere.”

The thought of cold, sweet blancmange made Belle’s mouth water, but she brushed her hand against Solène’s wrist and murmured, “It wouldn’t keep, you know? I don’t think the moss would, either, if transported. It’s too hot.”

With a grimace, Solène amended, “Alright. Father, I would like some new jewelry.”

He nodded. “That should be easy enough. And you, Belle?” The smile he graced her with was… It made her rather nostalgic to look at; it looked _confident_. “What would you like me to bring you?”

This was all just a little too neat. Belle wanted to be hopeful, was _trying_ to be hopeful, but it all seemed just a little too neat. She looked at her father, frowned, and was silent as she tried to think of something. Something she wanted. Something that would cost him little. Something she had missed.

“Father, bring me a rose.”

-0-0-0-

They knew from the start that it was going to be a while before they saw their father again. Even if the Merchant was traveling on horseback and not responsible this time for a heavy wagon, it was still _not_ a quick journey back to the city, and his business there was unlikely to be concluded quickly. They also had no idea just how _much_ he planned to do while he was there. He’d left in a rush; it wasn’t as if he’d given them a detailed account of his agenda.

Life went on much as it had when he was here. The Merchant had worked in the village, but had done relatively little of the housework. Actually, even Belle, who kept in mind most that he _did_ work in the village and didn’t usually come home until late afternoon when most of the chores were already done, and came home too tired to do much, anyways, was forced to acknowledge that, well, as far as the workload went, the sisters didn’t actually feel their father’s absence too keenly. He’d contributed money to the household, not labor.

“I do wish he’d send a letter back,” Belle admitted one morning, sitting at their father’s table to mend one of Solène’s shifts. The shutters were thrown back from the nearby window, and the early sun spilled golden light through the empty space, igniting the dust motes into stars. “We don’t even know where he is; he could have been delayed or hurt.”

Pausing by the door on her way out, Ghislaine stiffened and shrugged, not quite managing to convey the nonchalance such a gesture would suggest. “I’m sure he’s just wrapped up in his business. We’ll get a long, triumphant letter when he’s done and is ready to come collect us. You’ll see.”

Belle ‘hmmed’ in the back of her throat, had to squint and sigh and steel herself to keep her stitches neat and tight.

Their father had not contributed much to the household in the way of labor, but he had contributed a fair amount of money, and that was having an effect. Instead of being gone for part of the day, Ghislaine was now gone from the early morning until close to dark, trying to keep up with her and her father’s combined list of clients, trying to earn enough money that the sisters wouldn’t see any slide back from mild comfort into the sort of poverty that had seen them sleeping on the floor when they had first arrived here.

Now, Ghislaine was out of the house for nearly all of the sunlit hours, and returned home worn and exhausted, eating supper ravenously and heading up to bathe and sleep immediately after clearing the last bit of food off of her plate. Belle and Solène were stuck picking up the slack of the chores their eldest sister could no longer do herself, and accordingly, they weren’t staying up so late, themselves.

Belle would lie in bed in the dark, listening to the faint sounds of Solène snoring in the next room over, wanting to do something other than lie awake, but too tired to rise from her bed. With the net over her bed, she could open the slats on the shutters a little bit, to let in air and moonlight. A soft breeze whispered over her rough bedsheets and made the net rustle as if probed by an invisible hand. Moonlight bled milky white across her floor. She could light a candle and read—she’d managed to pick up a couple of books in the village, once there had come a fortuitous sale of a local worthy’s old and battered volumes. But the books would keep, while candles would not, and she who had once spent many nights staying up into the wee hours reading no longer had the extra light required to do so. Candles were too expensive for that, or so Solène kept telling her.

Her weary eyes would probably rearrange all the letters on the page, anyways. She had dreams like that, occasionally, dreams where the letters in whatever book she was reading would swim and swirl and eventually flood of the page in a torrent of ink, leaving only desolate pages behind.

Around a month into this, Ghislaine got it into her head to teach Solène and Belle some of the basics of accounting. The two of you could help me, she said. The two of you could earn money of your own so we don’t end up in too much of a bad way, she said, and considering how much work Belle and Solène already had to do, that argument was rather more persuasive than the first. More money would be nice.

The results were… mixed. Alright, ‘mixed’ was being a bit too generous. Ghislaine kept telling them that it was too early for them to actually be _good_ at it, that they’d need at least a couple years’ more practice before they could really call themselves good at it, but that made no difference to the fact that they were hardly good enough at it to even try helping Ghislaine. A few months into this, and Solène could balance a ledger and Belle could go so far as to produce (very basic) financial statements, but no more.

It was at least a way to spend time with each other, a way to keep from wondering what had become of their father. And maybe Ghislaine was right; maybe he was just so busy in the city that he didn’t have any time to write to them, or he’d forgotten. There were worse things in the world to be than a poor correspondent. Still, some word would have been nice. At least some notice of where he was staying, so that _they_ could send letters if need be.

Belle sat down by the back stoop one evening. The air was crisp and cold and the leaves were clinging feebly to the trees that pressed close together in the forest beyond, a dull, olive green shot through with veins of yellow and red and brittle spots of orange-brown. She caught one of the leaves as it drifted down, having given up the ghost at last, and ran her fingertips over its drying, leathery skin. As to where the future was leading, Belle wondered if she’d have to wait until the leaves on the trees were green and young again for an answer.


	5. Chapter Five

The snows came early this year, or, at least, they came earlier than they had the last two winters that Belle had spent here. The farmers were grumbling about these snows too, wincing at how they had killed the very last portion of the harvest that had yet to be gathered from the fields and snarling at how, on top of that, the roads were for a time rendered impassable and they couldn’t get the crops they _had_ harvested to market. It did not take much guesswork, then, to suppose that it was not normal for the snows to come this early.

But the snow had been here for close to a month, and though it had not come down all at once (thankfully; the sisters had already had several people at their house warning them to have a care for their roof), they got a fresh dusting every few days after that initial downpour, and it wasn’t exactly doing wonders for travel. The farmers weren’t the only ones having a hard time actually getting anywhere; the sisters, when circumstances necessitated they walk to another house or into the village, found their travel time doubled out of a need for care.

Once you got past how difficult it was to actually get anywhere—if your feet didn’t sink into the drifts, you were slipping and falling on patches of ice—it was quite lovely. In the early mornings, before any of them had to go outside, Belle could peek out her window and look on pristine white snowdrifts that glittered in the dawning sun. Before Solène took the broom to the icicles forming at the edge of the porch’s roof, they shimmered so prettily, and if not for the damage they could have done either falling on someone or staying where they were, Belle would have been sorry to see them go. When they had lived in the city, there had been little snow, and what icicles might have formed were knocked loose from their perch long before she woke in the morning. Here, it was certainly a sight to see.

The simple pleasure she derived from the sight of the snow was soured by the thought of how her father was getting on, if he was traveling through it. It had been four months, now. Unless the Merchant was intent on buying a new house in the city and seeing it completely furnished before coming home to collect his daughters, he should have concluded his business long before now. Even if he had to fight with the courts to take custody of the _North Star’s_ goods, Belle didn’t think that would have carried on as long as all that. Maybe.

He should have been back by now. That he wasn’t did not fill Belle with confidence, but it certainly gave fuel to her imagination.

And Ghislaine and Solène, who at first had seemed relieved to have him out from under their feet for a little while, were starting to get to the point where Belle could see them visibly stiffen whenever someone asked questions about the Merchant. Solène would falter, and Ghislaine’s jaw would go vise-tight and form a hard, straight line. Belle wasn’t certain what it was they feared. She wasn’t entirely certain what it was _she_ feared.

They didn’t have to fear for much longer.

One evening in the depths of snowy winter, there came a knocking on the door. The first round of knocking was faint, so faint that when Belle, sitting upstairs, first heard it, didn’t recognize it for what it was and just thought the wind was blowing against the side of the house. The wind liked to come to them in the dark, liked to pretend at being a visitor, liked to lure them downstairs and trick them into opening the front door, letting in a blast of icy air. It was just more of that, probably.

The knocking sound came again, and this time, Belle frowned. Sliding out of bed, she donned her shoes and her dressing gown and started for the hallway. There she found her sisters, already out of bed and starting for the stairs. “It could be Katell again,” Solène suggested. “She keeps thinking our roof is going to collapse under the snow and kill all of us.”

To that, Ghislaine shrugged. Her feet made dull, heavy thumps on the stairs. “Well, let’s go see.”

They had a policy of answering the door together when there came a knocking past sundown. Solène’s idea—she didn’t like Ghislaine or especially Belle going to answer it by themselves when they’d reached that time of day when casual visitors were a lot less likely than heralds of emergencies or other, less savory intentions. Her mouth pursed in a frown, Ghislaine threw the door open.

And stared.

Belle looked past Ghislaine’s shoulder, and found herself staring, too.

There, standing just past the doorway, was their father. But whatever Belle might have said to him dried up into silence at the sight of him.

The Merchant’s old clothes had, over the past three years, not become quite as worn-out as his daughters’. The work he had done had been conducted at a desk, and he’d gotten stains in his clothes sometimes from having to walk down muddy roads, but it was never to the same extent of the stains and tears in his daughters’ clothing. The same went for the few pieces of new clothing he’d found for himself since coming here; they were all in much better shape than they could have been, all things considered. In better shape than they could have been, but still decidedly shabby-looking.

Belle didn’t recognize the clothes he was wearing now. Offhand, she’d say he had definitely made good in the city, except the clothes didn’t quite look right. They were incredibly rich—the wool of his cloak looked soft enough to have against bare skin without the slightest discomfort, and unless Belle was very much mistaken, his deep blue doublet looked to be made of velvet. But that was just it; he was wearing a _doublet_. Doublets had gone out of fashion in the city some thirty years ago, and this one… Well, Belle had spent more than a little of her time looking at old fashion plates, and the cut of the doublet looked rather older than what had been the fashion thirty years ago.

It was Solène who first recovered enough to greet him. “Father…” She blinked, taking in, as Belle was, the haggard cast of his face, how white his skin had blanched, how he _stared_. “Father, are you alright?”

He didn’t respond. His eyes passed over each of the three of them in turn, but Belle didn’t think he was actually seeing them when he looked at them. There was nothing in his eyes that represented comprehension. After a long moment of that glassy stare, the Merchant said, his voice slightly strangled, “There’s something in the stable. I need you to bring it in here, fast as you can.”

Ghislaine stepped out into the frigid night. Belle followed, more than a little curious and more than a little concerned. In the stable, they found the old horse their father had bought just before he left for the city. They also found a large hinny with a thick, well-groomed coat and long, equally well-groomed mane and tail, and large, liquid dark eyes in one of the other stalls.

“I wonder where he found her,” Ghislaine remarked, pursing her lips as she looked the hinny over. “I don’t remember ever seeing too many donkeys in the city; there’s nothing for a stallion to breed with to produce a hinny.”

Belle, meanwhile, spotted something else. “Why didn’t he take those chests off of her when he took her in here?” she wondered to herself, nodding to the two large wooden chests strapped to the hinny’s sides.

“They must be what Father wanted us to bring inside. Come on, let’s get to it.”

Belle unbuckled one of the chests from the hinny’s side, and tottered under its weight—while she was certainly stronger than she used to be after three years of daily labor, most of that strength was _not_ to be found in her shoulders or her arms. “Is the one you have heavy, too?” she demanded of her sister. “This feels like it’s been filled with rocks; it’s so _solid_.”

Ghislaine nodded, grimacing as she hefted the chest she had taken off of the poor hinny. Though she was clearly straining, Belle couldn’t help but notice, discontented, that she wasn’t having quite so hard a time of it as was Belle. “Better not to open it until we get back inside. It might spill.”

They returned to the house to find their father sitting at the kitchen table, and Solène attempting to press a cup of the dark beer he liked into his hand. “Come now,” she murmured, her free hand twisting the belt of her dressing gown. “You’ll feel better, don’t you think?”

She pressed the cup against his hand, once, twice, three times, before the Merchant finally took it from her. He didn’t drink from it, instead holding it in a hand that was now clearly shaking slightly. Not shaking hard enough to make the beer slosh, but hard enough that it quivered noticeably in the cup, its little noises filling up the silence.

Belle and Ghislaine deposited the chests they’d taken out of the stable on the kitchen floor, and were in their seat at the table a second behind Solène. The four of them sat in a silence that was intruded upon only by the howling of the wind outside. The Merchant stared down into his cup, his red nostrils flaring as he took several deep, trawling breaths as if struggling for air.

Then his face screwed up, and he reached inside his cloak. He took from his cloak a remarkably fresh rose, redder and larger and more strongly, sweetly perfumed than any Belle had ever seen, slapping it down the table with enough force to make the table rattle. The Merchant met Belle’s eyes, and what swirled in them made Belle recoil. “Here is your rose,” he nearly snarled. “A steep price I paid for it.”

Belle stared at him in silence, fisted her hands in the folds of her dressing gown.

Meanwhile, Ghislaine glared at him, and Solène said crossly, “There’s a nice tone to use. Really, I should think a single rose wouldn’t be all that expensive. Certainly, it can’t have been equal to the jewelry I asked for—and I notice the lack of a mattress in your baggage train, so I assume _that_ was just impossible to obtain.”

The Merchant offered no apology, and Solène shifted from cross words to tight lips and furrowed brow. Ghislaine drummed her fingers against the table and stared at him coldly. Belle fixed her gaze on the rose, whose petals glistened as if coated in fresh dew. They were such a deep shade of crimson that Belle half-expected to see blood dripping from their tips. Something about this wasn’t right.

And she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. At length, Ghislaine asked, “How did you keep a hothouse rose fresh through the journey, anyhow?,” sounding curious very much in spite of herself.

To that, the Merchant squeezed his eyes shut and shuddered, seeming to age years in a day. “That…” His voice was very faint. “That isn’t a hothouse rose.”

-0-0-0-

_The Merchant’s Tale_

For all his hopes, all his optimism, the Merchant had not enjoyed the triumphant return to his former home that he had expected. He arrived in the city to find that the _North Star_ had docked a little over a week ago, and that her cargo had already been distributed. It seemed as if half the city had thought him _dead_ , of all things, and after the contents of his ship equal to his remaining debt and the interest had been sold off and the proceeds delivered to his creditors, the remainder had been auctioned off. The Merchant had arrived to find that even the ownership of the _North Star_ was currently in the process of being transferred to one of his old rivals.

The Merchant spent a little less than three months in litigation over ownership of the remainder of the _North Star’s_ cargo, as well as the _North Star_ herself. He won his case in the end, but his legal fees were so high that he left the city no richer than he’d entered it. Nothing had gone to plan. While finding himself debt-free for the first time in a very long time was a welcome development, he now found himself with nothing with which to galvanize his old career. Gone was any hope of procuring what Ghislaine and Solène had requested, and no matter where the Merchant looked, he could not find roses for sale, nor even a packet of rose seeds he could have taken with him. He left the city in a state of dejection.

Not only in the part of the country where he and his family had settled had the snows come early that year. Everywhere the Merchant was to pass through, the snows had come on earlier and harder than expected; the almanacs had predicted weather much milder than what came to pass. The Merchant, riding on horseback rather than by carriage (or sleigh) as he had hoped, was having a rough time of it. He could only travel so far in the course of a day before he had to stop, for fear that he or his horse would freeze. He slept in inns, in public houses, in people’s barns, and gradually, all these grew fewer and further between.

Finally, the Merchant reached the edge of the vast forest that stretched all the way to his new home, and he had a decision to make. He had only a week’s worth of food left, and less than that for his horse. Traveling through the forest was the most direct route back to home, but he had never taken that route before and did not know how long it would take, exactly—furthermore, there were no _roads_ through the forest. What he did know was that skirting the edge of the forest would take more than a week at the best of times, and unless he found someone willing to part with provisions in the dead of winter, he would run out of food for both himself and his horse long before he reached home. Seeing little else to do, the Merchant braved the forest.

After three days, the Merchant was sure he was going in roughly the right direction, but he had no idea how far he’d traveled, or exactly how much further he had to go. There was less snow under the dense forest canopy, which did at least allow for dead, frozen vegetation for the horse to graze on, but the other side of that was that the forest was locked in an endless gloom that made it difficult to distinguish dark night from barely lighter day. The paths through the forest were narrow and circuitous—some of them may have in fact been deer tracks—and the Merchant was rarely heading in the same direction for too long.

But then, something happened that the Merchant would never have expected. Rising up out of the mist and the gloom, he saw the spires of a castle. He stared at it in amazement. He had never heard tell of any castle in this forest, never heard any stories from the locals or read about it in any annal of history. And there were certainly no _roads_ in the forest; he’d never heard of there being roads before he entered it, and hadn’t seen any trace of roads after entering it. He could only begin to guess at how ancient the castle must be if it had dropped out of history without a trace, and had no expectation of finding it inhabited, but he rode on towards it nonetheless. It would at least provide shelter for the night, however rude that shelter might be.

The Merchant spurred his weary horse on in the direction of the castle. Eventually, he came to a massive hedge of holly bushes some twelve feet high, the points on their leaves gleaming threateningly, their glossy red berries glistening like an array of stars. He travelled along the hedge until he found a gate that was in far better condition than he would have expected, but was also mercifully unlocked. The Merchant entered through there, and found something stranger by far than the mere existence of a castle so deep in this forest.

Outside the castle walls, the world was locked in winter. It had been days since the Merchant had felt even slightly warm; shelter in someone’s barn, curled up under mounds of hay, was no substitute for a warm bed near a crackling fire. But the moment he and his horse passed through the gate, he was hit by a blast of warm air, and he surveyed his surroundings in naked shock.

The sky was still the same gloomy, overcast gray, so that the Merchant could only guess at the time of day, but the world within the castle walls was graced with a balmy spring. The castle grounds were green and vibrant, if a touch wild. The grass on either side of the path grew tall, the trees stretched their long and twisted fingers to the sky, and the perfume of the yellow and white and pink flowers shot through the tall grass filled the air with their light, sweet fragrance. It took nearly an hour to reach the base of the castle proper and the finely-appointed stable he found half-hidden by ivy, and he and his horse were both weary by that time, but it was a lovely walk, nonetheless.

After attending to his horse, the Merchant thought to attend to himself. There was a large, well-fed hinny in the stable, which made him think that there _must_ be someone living here, but of the master of the castle, he saw no sign. This castle was enchanted. It was easier than it should have been to accept that; it had been a long time since the Merchant had been a child, but he still remembered the fairy tales he had read and listened to. This castle was enchanted; it was the only thing that explained the state of the grounds. But that did not necessarily mean the castle was _empty_.

On the long flight of mossy stone steps the Merchant climbed to reach the top, he saw no one. On the terraces he passed on the way up, in the fabulous gardens he spied, he saw no one. And when the Merchant passed through the doors and entered the castle, he saw no one.

The Merchant’s weary, throbbing feet carried him to what must surely have been the great hall—though in this case, he was also following the evidence provided to him by his nose. There, he found the most welcoming sight he had seen since leaving his house in the country: a lavishly-appointed feasting table, a feast fit for the emperor of the world, if such a man existed.

There was a massive serving plate of roast pheasant garnished with pepper, orange slices, and fennel; the ex-pheasant’s long tail feathers were arranged about the plate. Suckling pig gleamed pink in the candlelight. These two dishes were the centerpiece of the table, but they were hardly all there was. There sat on the table sparkling crystal decanters of sweet-smelling, ruby-red wine, and water so clear he would have thought the decanters that contained them were empty, had he not seen their surfaces tremble as he walked by. There was present a large loaf of dark bread with a rich, earthy odor, and a bowl of pale, creamy butter sitting out beside it. A tureen of dark stew with lumps of beef and potato, with carrots and kidney beans and bacon and lentils, sat down near the far left side of the table, the pork bone used for flavoring sticking out of the center like a ship’s mast. The Merchant’s eyes lit upon a platter of sugar plums; nearby it sat a platter of lemon cakes nearly a foot tall, icing dribbling down from the top to pool in the deep basin of the platter. Closer to the right end of the table perched a plate of roasted carrots, a plate of fried oranges, a wheel of soft, pearlescent yellow-orange cheese. A bowl of candied almonds and a bowl of strawberry preserves completed the picture, though there were many more wondrous foods sitting on the table that the Merchant did not recognize at first glance.

The sight and smell of the food made the Merchant’s mouth water, but at first, he hesitated. This was, after all, an enchanted castle, and the Merchant had no way of knowing if he actually had permission to eat at this table. But he was weak with hunger, and after calling out for his host and receiving no reply, he threw caution to the winds and ate.

Caution abandoned, the Merchant ate his fill. Indeed, he rather over-indulged, for it had been a long time since he had last had the chance to eat food even half so fine, or so much of it at once. When he had last been in the city, litigation and preparations for court proceedings had eaten so much of his time that he had little time to feed himself. Those three years of exile in the country had seen him eating sparsely and plainly. And just in the past few days, meals had been few and spaced further apart than was comfortable. He was, by the time he had reached this table, truly weak with hunger.

When he had eaten his fill, exhaustion came upon him all at once, and he cast about for a place to sleep. He found a small room a few doors down the hallway leading out of the great hall that looked like a small salon. A fire was burning merrily in the grate, and close by it was a plush-cushioned chaise lounge with a pillow and a duvet stuffed with down lying on top of it. This, at least, was a message that could be taken unambiguously—the master of the castle certainly had a bedchamber to sleep in.

The next morning, the Merchant awoke, refreshed, to find breakfast set out before him on a low, polished mahogany table: a cup of coffee with milk and cream sitting out for taste, a plate of toast with poached eggs on top, a small cut of salty ham, a cut of sausage, and a bowl of porridge with honey and blackberries. Fresh clothes had been set out for him as well. The Merchant ate and prepared to leave, after trying again in vain to locate his host and thank them for their hospitality. He retrieved his horse from the stables and began to walk down an avenue he found when stepping out of the stable’s back doors.

The avenue was narrow, paved with gray cobblestones that glistened with dewy moss. It was lined with flowering trees, and, the Merchant discovered, rose bushes that towered ten feet high and higher. The roses were larger and more beautiful than any the Merchant had ever seen, their scent so strong it made him slightly light-headed, and the sight of them made him remember his promise to Belle. He might not be able to get Ghislaine or Solène what they had asked for, but he could at least take a rose back to Belle. It would likely have started to wilt by the time he reached home, but it was at least _something_.

An especially lush, rich red rose hung temptingly low, just above the Merchant’s head when he rode on horseback. He reached up to pinch off the stem a few inches from the base of the flower, and knew instantly that he had made a terrible mistake.

A cold wind gusted up the avenue from the castle, easily piercing his thick cloak. A low, guttural growl like a rumble of thunder sounded from behind him, and the Merchant looked back in horror, tottering and falling from the back of his horse, as a creature emerged from the dense bushes.

He could scarcely describe what it looked like, only to say that it was a monster some seven feet tall, covered in black fur, possessed of terrible yellow eyes. The Monster wore, of all things, the clothing of a noblewoman; it would have been ridiculous to see such a twisted creature dressed in such finery, had the Merchant not been struck low with terror.

The Monster greeted him in a harsh, guttural voice like the screeching of metal dragged across stone, “So, good sir, this is how you repay my hospitality? I allow you to take shelter in my home, sleeping under my roof and eating my food, and you repay me with theft? How dare you?”

The Merchant collapsed to the ground, his hands held up in supplication. “Oh, please, Madame—“

The Monster’s eyes narrowed, and the Merchant immediately quieted. “Do not call me that,” she growled. “I am not ‘Madame.’” She spat on the ground; her whole body shook momentarily. “I am the Beast. And by your act of theft, you have forfeited your life.”

“I beg you, spare me!”

“I cannot.”

But again, the Merchant begged the Beast to spare his life. He had only picked the rose, he pleaded, because his daughter had expressed her longing for them. She loved roses so, and there were none where they now lived. How could he deny her?

At that, the Beast paused, regarding the Merchant closely. When she spoke, it was to ask him how many children he had. Did he love them? He told her that he had three daughters and that yes, he loved them.

The Beast was silent again. The air around where she stood grew unpleasantly charged. After what felt like an eternity, she pronounced her sentence: The Merchant must return to her castle in a week’s time. He could either come by himself to meet his fate, or he could bring one of his daughters to take his place instead. But, the Beast said very firmly, if one of his daughters did give themselves up in his place, it _must_ be of her own will. She must have the full truth of the situation, must know exactly what it was she did by coming here, must come of her own will without having been coerced in any way.

“And I warn you, do not attempt to cheat me. If you try to cheat your fate, your fate will not fail to find you.”

The Merchant was numb, and allowed the Beast to lead him back to the castle, back to what appeared to be some form of treasure room. When she told him to fill up two empty chests with whatever riches he saw fit, he did so only out of fear of her reaction if he refused. It was blood money, obviously, but he dared not refuse.

-0-0-0-

The silence that fell over the kitchen was heavy as any leaden shroud. The wind howled, wreaking its fury on the house in the form of rattling window shutters and groaning walls. The shutters over the kitchen windows had been replaced the previous year, and they no longer had such wide gaps as they did earlier, but they still had their gaps, and little piles of powdery snow formed on the windowsills, glittering in the light of the oil lamp.

Belle stared at the rose. She could barely hear the wind over the pounding of her pulse in her ears. She stared at it. She felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs.

Eventually, the silence between the four of them was broken, though later, Belle would be utterly unable to say which one of her sisters had broken it.

“Why… why are you looking at her like that?”

For a moment, just for a moment, Belle dared to look up and meet her father’s gaze. And not even a moment had passed before she wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t often that someone looked at her with that particular mixture of pleading and accusation. She lowered her head, gaze darting back and forth between the rose and her hands, folded in her lap and just now beginning to shake.

This time, when one of her sisters spoke, Belle could clearly identify the speaker. “You… _You_ …” Ghislaine’s voice was strangled, pitching high and harsh. “You wouldn’t _dare_ …”

Silence from their father, and oh, how damning that silence was.

“Yes, he would!” Solène snapped, her voice rising close to a screech. “Look at him; it’s in his face! You, how _dare_ you?!” The legs of Solène’s chair scraped with a jarring squeal as she leapt from her seat. “She is your _child_ ; how dare you?!”

Whatever it was that showed on the Merchant’s face now, it was enough to convince Ghislaine of his thoughts. “It’s hardly Belle’s fault that you wandered into a cursed garden in an enchanted castle and thought it would be a good idea to pick one of the flowers. You remembered enough about old fairy tales to be wary of eating the food, but _not_ enough to know that anything resembling theft is a bad idea?” Her voice dripped skepticism; her tongue was coated with acid. “Why exactly should Belle suffer because you decided to do something so stupid as that?”

“ _I’ll_ go, if saving your own life is so important to you,” Solène went on, but she was shaking so badly that Belle’s eyes were drawn to it in spite of herself. “I might give the Beast indigestion, but at least Belle won’t—“

“I’ll do it.” Solène fell silent as if her voice had been stolen right from her. “I’ll go.”

Belle met their gazes in turn—there was no avoiding that, now—feeling… Not calm. Never calm. She didn’t feel anything at all. Her heart had turned to ice in her chest, and it filled her up with numbing cold. So when she met her sisters’ distraught eyes and her father’s troubled eyes, she did so without flinching.

Ghislaine and Solène’s protests, when they came, went up to the roof like thunder.

“Belle, no!”

“This isn’t your burden; it’s not your _fault_. You shouldn’t have to lay down your life because of something someone else did!”

Finally, their father spoke up to say, in a low, drawn out voice, “That won’t be necessary.” He licked his lips, swallowed hard. “I will return to that place by myself.”

And Belle stared them all down, her eyes hard and her face resolute, if cold-numb. “I’ll go. The Beast said it herself. Whoever goes must go of their own will. It must be their choice.” She clenched her hands into fists. “This is my choice: I will go to that castle, and I will face the Beast.”


	6. Chapter Six

In her time, Belle had attended a fair few funerals and wakes—of the latter, she had even found herself invited to a few during her time living in the country. Houses that bore the burden of planning such things had their own weight to them. The house itself was shrouded in gray lead; less light than was expected reached through the windows, and what did filter through was wan and dim, so that candles were lit even at noon. Though the deceased was not always remembered fondly, not always dearly missed, the stress of preparing a wake and a funeral made itself clearly felt; the living who dwelled in the house of the deceased walked slowly, shoulders slumped and heads slightly bowed, as if weighted down with an invisible yoke. The air was close and stale, almost dank.

If not for the bitter cold without, Belle would have opened the shutters to clear the dank air within her own home.

Belle had never known a week as long as this one. Even the days leading up to their quitting the city had moved faster than this. Every waking moment was filled with the idea of what her future held, the fate that she had sealed for herself with her words. The tall, dark trees cast their shadows over her, and it was impossible not to think of it as the darkness of an open grave. She already felt half-separated from the world of the living. The translucently-shrouded sun did not shine on her. Her family looked at her with the hollow-eyed horror one would fix upon a ghost. Food was as ash in her mouth.

Sometimes, when the wind came to her and howled on her shutters, begging to be let in, Belle lied awake in bed and considered calling it off. Going to her father and telling him that she did not wish to take his place, that damn her desire for a rose, _he_ had picked it and _he_ could face the consequences for having picked it. (The rose had vanished. Belle didn’t know who had taken it, couldn’t find it in herself to ask. Its perfume had yet to leave the kitchen, and now, it no longer seemed sweet to her—only cloying.)

If she went to her father and told him she no longer wished to take his place, Belle knew she would not be without support. Her sisters would take her part—enthusiastically—and the Beast’s own stipulations meant that the Merchant would have no choice but to return to the castle by himself, and surrender himself to the Beast. But she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t back out now. The wheels of the world were turning, and they had put her on a path she couldn’t see any way off of. There was the road, and all around was darkness; the darkness closed in behind her, spurring her forwards. Belle couldn’t imagine asking someone to die in her place. She just couldn’t.

_Will it be quick? Will it be quick, at least?_

_Will it hurt?_

As slowly as time was moving, it moved, and the end of Belle’s last week in this house that had been home for three years came upon them wearing a gray, foggy morning that shrouded all the world in a wan, frigid haze. No fresh snow had fallen during the night, and there was no wind. All was quiet, but it was no easy silence. It was as if the world was holding its breath.

Belle would have preferred that she and her father leave without saying any goodbyes. Saying goodbyes meant facing her sisters. Facing her sisters meant… doubt.

“It’s not too late,” was the first thing out of Ghislaine’s mouth after they left the house. “You haven’t left yet; it’s not too late.”

Their feet crunched in the snow as they headed towards the stable, and Belle liked that sound better than the pounding of her heart that was her most immediate response to Ghislaine’s response. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“Belle, please.” Rather than the sharpness Ghislaine’s voice was running to, Solène’s was soft with choked-back tears. “You don’t have to do this.”

Belle came to a halt just outside the stable doors, her gloved hand poised over the handle. Her breath caught in her throat; she forced breath back into her mouth and swallowed, then took a deep, steady breath.

She knew she didn’t have to do it. She didn’t need to be told that.

Belle straightened, stood as straight as she could without her spine starting to hurt. She lifted her chin as she turned to look at her sisters, and balled her hands into fists behind her back. “This is my choice.” And how her voice was so even, she would never know. “I chose this. I’ll see it through.”

Solène hid her face in her hands and mumbled something Belle couldn’t quite make out, but sounded something like “don’t see how you _could_ have.” Her shoulders trembled in a way that certainly had nothing to do with the cold.

Ghislaine held Belle’s gaze, and there was a long moment when Belle thought that Ghislaine might start to cry. She wondered, with a detached sort of curiosity, if one or both of her sisters crying might be enough to crack through the shell that seemed to have formed around her heart. Would she start to cry as well? Or would, when the shell was cracked, her heart remain numb and cold, unable to process on any emotional level what was happening today?

(There was a distant scream building slowly, so slowly, in Belle’s chest. Maybe not so numb, after all.)

But Ghislaine merely swallowed thickly and nodded. Then, she did something she hardly ever did, rarer even than crying. She stepped forward, put her hands on Belle’s shoulders, and pulled Belle into a tight embrace. A second pair of arms wrapping around her a few seconds later signaled Solène’s participation.

Belle wobbled slightly on her feet. She couldn’t help it. It betrayed a lack of lady-like poise, but she wasn’t a lady anymore, and she couldn’t help it. She was silent, and did not cry.

The door to the stable pushed slowly open, revealing their father, gray-faced and silent, holding the reins of the horse and the hinny. It was time to go.

-0-0-0-

Belle had never ventured into the forest before. She had never had time. Her days were filled with work, and at night she was so exhausted by working that rarely could she do more than sleep. There was no time to go exploring during the day, when Belle acted as a household drudge, and even had she the energy at night, it wouldn’t have been safe—Belle had heard enough stories, both fantastical and decidedly less so, to convince her of that.

She had never gone inside the forest, though the idea had occasionally interested her, and thus, she had little idea of what to expect. When Belle rode the hinny past the tree line, trailing after her father on his horse, she stared up and around her, not quite curious, but willing, at least, to look. (She did not look back.)

Not that there was much to see. The fog followed them here, thick as wool, and it veiled the forest in its opacity, robbing everything of their edges. Belle stared up towards the treetops, and found that the dark, mossy trunks (though that moss was brown and shriveled) jut disappeared into the still, silent banks of fog. Everything that sat more than about ten feet away was a hazy outline that seemed the mirage-suggestion of a dream.

That was it. Belle felt as if she was moving through a dream. That must be why she could not feel the dips and jolts of riding on a beast’s back. Why she felt no hunger, despite not having eaten any breakfast. Why the puffs of vapor that escaped her mouth lingered so long. Why she wasn’t crying.

There were some moments when Belle was tempted to spur the hinny forward to match pace with the horse and ask her father if he remembered where they needed to go, if he remembered how long it would take them to reach the castle. She was bound at this pace and bound to her silence by a weary inertia. There was no point. So long as they arrived before midnight, it mattered not at all.

And the silence persisted, even long after it should have dispelled. There was no birdsong, no wind, no crack of twigs or branches. The snow was shallower under the trees, but it still muffled noise, more than perhaps it should have. They passed by a wide creek cut deep into the earth. Its sheer banks were veined with exposed tree roots that stretched greedily into the gelid water. Pewter-gray boulders crowned with snow jutted from the water. A single heron stood in the shallows, hunched low with its feathers plumped against the cold. The water flowed quickly, and so quietly that Belle could scarcely hear it. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she was going deaf.

After what might have been one hour or five, Belle and the Merchant found their progress brought to a halt. Looming out of the dim fog was the towering wall of holly bushes the Merchant had described, tangled branches beckoning towards them; the spires of the castle itself must have been lost in banks upon banks of fog. Belle stared at the hedge with a sort of numb wonder. She’d gotten no indication of it from her father’s story, but the holly bushes, asides from their great height, they didn’t look as holly bushes ought. They didn’t look natural. The rich dark green of the leaves reflected more light than they ought, considering how little light there was to be found. The piercing vermillion of the berries looked as if they had been painted with carmine. The hues were just too vivid.

_It is the hedge of an enchanted castle that a Beast calls home. Are you truly surprised by this?_

Still, such vivid colors were jarring in the haze. Everything else was painted gray and white and dull brown, and then to see this green and red, untouched even by the snow…

It didn’t matter.

Belle and the Merchant rode along the border of the hedge wall for a few miles (or maybe just a single mile; it was difficult to tell, especially when you weren’t paying the most attention to things like distance), until they found a metal gate. It was of polished, gleaming steel, catching light whose source Belle could not see. She could see verdant spring through the bars, but it was not until her father opened the gate that she felt the gust of warm air hit her face. The unmistakable, inescapable green smell of spring made her eyes sting, her chest constrict. She could not cry.

They rode down a narrow cobblestone road with grass growing up through the stones. Belle tried to catch her father’s eye several times, but to no avail, and eventually gave up, and devoted herself to studying her surroundings.

It was just as her father had described: an oasis of mild spring, a refuge from the cold, barren winter outside the holly hedge. Not just mild, though; _warm_ , and Belle soon found herself shedding her gloves and unfastening her cloak to lay across her saddle in front of her. Long, sweet-smelling grass swayed gently in a breeze that Belle could not feel, giving a softened, rounded look to the already-gently sloping hills they rode through. There were trees scattered about, ash, birch, pine, rowan, oak, sparse when close to the path, but growing more thickly the further out you looked. There were a radiant multitude of flowers growing among the grass and the trees. Rosemary and lilies, but also pinkish-lilac asphodel and asters, piercing blue hyacinths, buttery yellow primrose and quivering scarlet poppies. From off in the distance, Belle could hear the birds singing that had been so absent in the wintry forest without.

She was almost shocked to find that she could appreciate the beauty of this place. Because it _was_ beautiful, in a slightly hair-raising kind of way. It was a place where nature was more alive than Belle had ever known it to be anywhere else she had lived. The earth beneath her seemed almost to breathe. She did not think it would harm here. There was something else here that had the capacity to harm her. She wished, with a mix of wistfulness and rising panic, that she could have had longer to appreciate the beauty of these fields.

Now that she was within the hedge and the fog no longer obscured her vision, Belle had an unobstructed view of the castle where dwelt the Beast. It was… The only way Belle could describe it was that it looked like something straight from a fairytale (Which was, in retrospect, entirely appropriate).

The sky here was overcast, though there was much more light than there had been in the forest. The sun could not be seen, and yet the pale gray stone of the castle walls sparkled as if lit up by full sun. Standing at the top of a possibly artificial hill with many levels cut into green terraces, the castle’s multitude of spires shot up towards the sky; banners in pale blue and gold flapped in the wind.

It was such a large place, to house but one inhabitant. Or perhaps it had once housed far more than that—had housed everyone a castle _could_ house—and something terrible had befallen them. Whether that something was the work of the Beast or not, Belle couldn’t imagine. Perhaps the Beast was only an opportunistic creature, who had decided to capitalize on the misfortune of the long-dead. Perhaps not. This speculation didn’t matter, given Belle’s fate. She found herself wondering, anyways.

Upon reaching the stable where the Merchant had first found the hinny, Belle found herself looking around her less and less. She had to focus on her own breathing, had to fight to keep it even. She did not want… did not want to let it show. Didn’t want to give anything or anyone the satisfaction of seeing her fear. She would have gladly gone back to dealing with Géraud and his like if it would have meant that she was not doomed to end her life in this place, a place with all the beauty of belladonna—captivating and deadly.

Part of Belle hoped her father wouldn’t see the way her palms were beginning to sweat. Part of her hoped he would see it, hoped he would never forget what he had seen.

When they had walked up the flights of stairs to the castle proper, they found the great oaken doors flung open, in clear anticipation of visitors. The Merchant looked upon the castle interior with a shudder, face contorting and eyes bulging as if in terrible pain. Belle watched him, a spike of concern managing to push back her own roiling panic, though she could not find it in herself to ask after his well-being.

This was…

Seeing that her father would make no move to enter the castle on his own, Belle drew a deep breath, not nearly as steady as she would have liked but still deep, and stepped over the threshold. Seeing her able to act, her father soon followed after her.

The entrance hall of the castle was immense. The ceiling soared away from Belle’s head some twenty or thirty feet, a white-washed, vaulted ceiling upon which there was painted green vines with golden flowers and blue and red birds whose wings seemed almost to visibly flutter. The floor was laid down with shimmering silver-gray tiles that were themselves inset with lapis lazuli, jet, and mother-of-pearl arranged as great, shimmering flowers. There were tables and chairs set against the walls; hanging from the walls were tapestries portraying a variety of scenes, most of them involving hunting.

The Merchant cast his gaze about the entrance hall, eyes darting back and forth. “She isn’t here,” he whispered, a high, almost screechy giggle escaping his mouth. “Perhaps we are fortunate; perhaps she has—“

“So, you have come, after all.”

That voice, as guttural and as inhuman as the Merchant had described, put an end to their hopes.

Belle cast her gaze around the entrance hall, trying to determine the source of the voice, since she could spy neither hide nor hair of the Beast. She eventually settled on a tall, dense folding screen, four panels with a frame of deep red wood and fabric depicting what looked like cornflowers and dianthus, that stood near the hallway that ventured deeper into the castle. She thought she saw the stretched fabric quiver slightly.

Why the Beast would hide herself in her own castle (whether her possession was rightful or not), Belle couldn’t imagine. Perhaps she wanted to build up suspense.

The Merchant stepped forward, nodding shakily—though honestly, that could have just been him shaking so badly that he seemed to nod, for his shoulders shook uncontrollably. “I’ve kept my word.”

“Truly.” There was, Belle thought, the slightest hint of skepticism in that harsh, grating rumble of a voice. “Doubtlessly the fear of death spurred your forwards, for I can see how you tremble. And you.” This, Belle could only assume, was addressed to her. “What is your name?” Here, that faint hint of skepticism turned to a rather less faint strain of curiosity.

At this, Belle stepped forward. Fear still captivated her blood and her heart, but years of training were taking over, and though she did not bow or curtsey (no use wasting excess courtesies on the one who had claimed her life), she managed a stiff nod and a straight back. “My name is Belle.” Her voice was softer and more even than she would have thought.

“Belle.” That voice _almost_ went soft with something like consideration, but it was quick and it was only one syllable, after all; it didn’t last. “So, you have come to take your father’s place.”

Another nod, and a remarkably steady, “I have.”

“Hmm.” This time, the skepticism came across louder and harder to mistake. “And you have truly come of your own will, in full possession of the facts?”

It was only those long years of training that kept Belle from curling her lip in a snarl. “ _Yes,_ I have come here of my own will, in full possession of the facts, out of _love for my father_. Is that so difficult to believe?”

There came no response for a few moments; instead, there was a whistling sound as if the Beast was letting out a breath. “In my experience—“ the gruff, grating voice served as a thick mask to emotion, but Belle thought she picked up, this time, on something that stood at the crossroads of wryness and bitterness “—those in possession of power over other people rarely scruple to exploit that power. The temptation is just too great.

“You may leave us,” she said suddenly, and it took Belle and the Merchant several moments to process just what she had pronounced.

The Merchant’s face blenched to salty white. “But I… she… Please, I—“

“Leave.” There was less give there than to be found in solid granite. “Do not return to this place.”

So it was that Belle and her father’s farewell, if it could be called such, was a brief affair. He seemed to think of embracing her, hands poised on her shoulders, but merely gave them a brief squeeze and shook his head. There was… Belle had never been starved for affection, and she had never been desperate for an embrace, either. A hand to the shoulder or the arm had always been enough for her before. She wanted…

It didn’t matter what she wanted. While Belle had been paralyzed, her father had already begun to walk away. A panicked plea shot up to her tongue and battered viciously against her lips. She fisted her hands in her wool skirt and watched him disappear without saying a word. A betrayal, the pounding of her heart told her, though she was not sure just what was the betrayal—his departure or her silence—and it was not enough to make her open her mouth. She was not alone. She was being watched, being evaluated. She kept her back straight.

“You will find your rooms on the second floor.” The Beast was speaking again, so matter-of-factly, as if Belle had not just watched her father walk away from her for the last time. “I expect to see you in the great hall for supper at seven o’clock this evening. You are free to go where you will in the castle and among the castle grounds until then.” There came a heavy rustling sound, and then, silence.

There was nothing else to do. On legs that wobbled ever-so-slightly now that she was no longer under scrutiny, Belle paced further into the castle. She was just looking for a staircase; she had no desire to drink in the grandeur of her surroundings, not any longer. But even this was denied her, for when she found a staircase up to the second floor, it was in another massive hall, and the stairs were made of a pearly white stone veined with what was either gold or a very convincing substitute. They were so highly polished that Belle could make out her reflection in the steps, white-faced and taut, and the wonder that shot through her was yet another betrayal.

It was easy enough, when Belle reached the second floor, to determine which door was the door to her “rooms.” There was only one door which she found that was both unlocked and open. That made the whole thing easy to figure out.

Later, Belle would marvel again at her surroundings, but in this moment, all she noticed was that there was a bed. Without even taking her shoes off, she flung herself onto the bed, sinking into the soft, well-stuffed mattress, thick, gasping breaths tearing from her mouth and thick, hot tears spilling from her eyes. She curled in on herself, stomach churning, doing as she did when she was a child: trying desperately to shrink out of existence, and disappear from the sight of anything which might harm her.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ **CN/TW** : Discussion of murder]

The bed practically begged Belle to sleep in it. That was what she first noticed, when her choked-back sobs began to abate. It wasn’t anything specific; it wasn’t as if the bed itself was whispering to her (Which was a mercy—after everything else, a talking bed would have been just the thing to send her into a fresh, gibbering terror). But she sank into the impossibly soft mattress as if it had no bottom, as if the bed had no wooden slats to hold the mattress in place. Which was odd, Belle thought, sitting up with a little difficulty and wiping salt-bitter tears from her face with a swipe of her thumb. She didn’t feel as though the mattress was in danger of falling to the floor, or whatever might be lying under the bed. It was just soft, softer than any mattress she had ever slept on in her life.

When curiosity began to spark in earnest, Belle tried to fight it. It didn’t matter. It felt like a defeat to be curious about her surroundings when this place was to be her tomb, when she would not have long enough to uncover its secrets. Curiosity didn’t matter.

And yet, curiosity reared its head, and after a few minutes grappling with it, trying to convince herself just to lie down on the bed, maybe sleep all through supper and force the Beast to come up here and kill her instead of walking to her own death, Belle stopped fighting. She shook her head and bit back a sigh. Best to try to get a sense of her surroundings.

The duvet of the bed was a silvery-gray velvet, wonderfully soft to the touch; if Belle had to guess, it had been stuffed with down, maybe eiderdown. Belle stripped away the white linen bedsheets to press her hand to the mattress; it, too, seemed to be stuffed with down. It was a four-poster bed; the frame was made of a rich, nearly glowing mahogany, carved with vines and delicate, lily-like flowers, and the hangings were silk that matched the duvet in color.

Belle slid out of the bed and began to drink in the sight of this bedroom in full. As she did, her eyes widened, and her heart began to beat just a little faster.

After what she had seen of the castle, both what she had drank in fully and what she had barely glanced over, that the bedroom of the rooms assigned as hers should be lavishly appointed should not have come as a surprise. Everything else looked as if woven from the fabric of a dream—if this wasn’t an enchanted castle, Belle would have said the master of the castle must be richer than Croesus—so there was no reason “her” bedroom wouldn’t have been as well. And yet, as Belle continued to drink in what surrounded her, a little gasp escaped her lips.

The tables and cabinets were made from the same rich, shining mahogany, and were carved with the same motifs. The chairs, which were also constructed of mahogany and also carved with the same floral motifs, had soft, plush cushions upholstered in powder-blue velvet. A spotlessly clean fireplace with logs stacked up next to it was nestled in the wall of the room on the left hand side of the head of the bed. There was a tall curtain matching the cushion upholstery in color at the far side of the room from the door. When Belle crossed tiled floor to open them, she expected a window, and found instead a glass-paneled door out to a covered balcony with a wrought-iron table and chairs.

There was a writing desk well-supplied with paper, parchment, and quills. There were also several inkwells carved from what looked like alabaster, with three alabaster frogs (studded with gold) pressed up the sides of the base, the lid inlaid with gold and emerald leaves. Little labels in gold letters along the neck of the inkwells, just above the frogs, read ‘black,’ ‘blue,’ ‘red,’ ‘purple’, ‘green,’ and so on.

There was also a vanity with a with a large, highly-polished glass mirror. Here, Belle couldn’t restrain another gasp, for there were a multitude of crystal bottles sitting out on the countertop of the vanity and in open cabinets on either side of the mirror, all of them filled with perfumes hued clear, gold, pink, lavender, periwinkle blue. An ebony box veneered with alabaster was revealed to be lined with blue velvet and full of silk and satin ribbons. A look in the drawers revealed gold combs and cushioned brushes with pinkish rosewood handles and horsehair bristles, and tubes and boxes of cosmetics.

And there were three doors leading off from the bedroom (not counting the door to the balcony) and not, Belle thought, back out into the corridor—two off from the left side of the head of the bed, and one off from the right. She didn’t bother grappling with her curiosity this time, didn’t bother trying to push it down. She needed to have an exact idea of what her surroundings were, even if her time to enjoy them was limited.

Belle’s first foray was through the door off to the right. In it, she found a long, narrow room which housed a full-sized mirror at the far end, and seven tall, wide wardrobes lining the walls. The space where an eighth wardrobe could have stood was instead occupied by a circular table upon which sat a large box of ebony. A quick peek inside revealed it to be a treasure chest of a jewelry box, the largest one Belle had ever seen, full of necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings, brooches, cloak pins, and hair pins. If this was what the jewelry looked like, Belle couldn’t imagine what the clothing inside of those wardrobes would look like. There were queens and empresses who hadn’t had such fine jewelry as what she had found in that—it wasn’t really a box, was it, more like a cabinet.

The second room was a cool, quiet room with tiled floors, walls, and ceiling, a washroom with a massive bathtub sunken into the floor, a towel rack, and an empty rack Belle could only assume was meant to hang a nightgown and a dressing gown. There was a sandalwood cabinet in which Belle found multiple ceramic jars (in varying shades of blue, green, and yellow) of bath salts and multiple ceramic boxes (white, pink, lavender) of different varieties of pearly, sweet-smelling soap.

The third room was a sitting room with a large window, but no balcony. Arrows of grayish-white light shot through the window to illuminate a low mahogany table with bowed legs and two chairs cushioned similarly to the chairs in the bedroom on one side of the table, and a plush divan on the other side of the table. And on the table itself, there was a tray of food and drink.

Belle stared at the tray, her curiosity suddenly evaporating as her stomach began to tie itself into knots. The food was clearly fresh; Belle could see a little wisp of steam curling in the air from the spout of the porcelain teapot. A clear invitation, but Belle had been able to forget, however briefly, that she was not alone in this place, and even if this was not the Beast’s work, it still…

Belle hadn’t eaten any breakfast. Barely a moment after her eyes lit on the food, her stomach began to growl in protest of its deprivation. She couldn’t quite yet bring herself to eat, but she went to sit on the divan, sighing heavily as she sank into the luxurious brocaded cushions.

This, all of this… Her father had mentioned being led into a treasure room after being caught out by the Beast. Belle didn’t know what he had put in the two chests provided him; knowing her father, it had been something supremely valuable. Perhaps all the riches of this place were everything tales said of fairy gold, and what her father had put in those chests had turned to dross once he left this place of uncanny power. Perhaps they hadn’t. Belle thought to herself, unable to restrain a spike of bitterness searing in her chest, that if she could have transported everything she had seen in these rooms alone out of the castle, they could have been used not only to restore her family to their former wealth, but ensure that her father would never have to work again, and that she and her sisters would want for nothing in their lifetime. The jewelry alone would have put to shame a king’s ransom, and Belle couldn’t have imagined how valuable some of the perfumes she had seen were. The furniture would have fetched a fortune, and if the wardrobes were stuffed full of clothes as fine as Belle suspected they must be, they’d fetch a fortune, too. There would have been some questions as to where they had gotten all of these things, but Belle suspected appropriate discretion would have been sufficient to ward off arrest.

 _Not that I’ll ever have the chance to find out_. Belle wound a lock of hair tight around her finger—terrible habit for a grown woman, but there wasn’t anyone (human) to witness it, and soon enough, the lapse wouldn’t matter anymore, anyways.

Again, Belle’s eyes strayed to the food, and again, her stomach growled in protest of its emptiness. _Fine_ , she thought savagely, _I will accept your hospitality and eat your food, and see the dishonor you heap upon yourself by killing me grow tenfold._

The tray and the water pitcher were both gleaming silver; the teapot and teacup both white and pale green porcelain; the water glass, pale, clear glass. There were two faluche buns sitting on a plate on the tray; nearby were two small cups of butter and cream, and two small knives to spread it with. At the far right corner of the tray, there was a glossy, ruby-red apple.

Plain food, hardly the feast her father had described; even the tea, if Belle’s nose did not deceive her, smelled like plain black tea. But that was likely for the best. On her unsettled stomach, Belle suspected rich food would have only had her vomiting in the washroom.

Belle spread cream on one of the faluche buns and raised it to her lips. Immediately after biting into the soft, dense bread, her eyes began to water, half tears and half simple reaction. The faluche was piping hot, so that the sweet, thick cream ran in her mouth and steam spilled from the tear in the bun and the roof of her mouth was almost scalded, but not quite.

She’d not had faluche in three years. The bread of the region where she had settled was dark and coarse, and was made by local bakers into thick, cylindrical loaves. Moreover, while you could get the bread soft if you requested it that way, it was often baked hard, with a tough crust that hurt the teeth to bite into. This was apparently meant to lend longevity to the bread; Belle had listened often enough to women in the village say that if you found a bit of mold on the bread, you could just scrape it off, and the rest of the loaf would be fine. (This was not wisdom of which Belle or her sisters had ever been remotely convinced. If one of them spotted a fleck of baleful blue on the bread, that was as clear a signal as any of them needed that it was time to tear up the bread and scatter it for the birds.)

This bread tasted just like the faluche Belle used to get in her favorite bakery in the city, and yet the flavor was clearer in her mind, stronger and livelier. Maybe it was just the effect of fading memory, but this faluche tasted _realer_ , somehow. Belle went through the two buns in quick succession, not even bothering to spread cream across the second. Her already ravenous hunger had taken on a desperate edge, and she felt that she would not be sated until all the food before her was gone. But when she turned to the apple, she found that she could eat more slowly, and doing so allowed her to savor the apple, crisper and sweeter than any of the half-soft apples she had eaten in the past.

As she was pouring herself a cup of tea, Belle thought about supper and shook her head wearily. _If I am to die, at least I will not die on an empty stomach, or a stomach filled with bad food_.

Belle remained seated on the divan for she didn’t know how long, twisting the fringe at the nearest cushion seam abruptly in her fingers, just staring out at the gray sky. She didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to explore the castle, didn’t particularly want to do anything. She had no desire to potentially come across her captor/prospective killer ahead of supper. She had no desire, as she stared out on that gray sky, for anything at all, beyond the prolonging of her own life.

But as that gray sky began to darken, ever so slightly, Belle roused herself. It occurred to her, with an unpleasant twist in her stomach, that if she did not perform to please, there might be consequences for her family. There had been rumors in the village of a monster ni the woods; did that mean that the Beast left this uncanny place from time to time, or was it something unrelated? The Beast was vengeful enough to demand someone’s death over a rose; would she, if Belle did not present herself for supper, wreak further revenge?

And besides, if Belle must die tonight, she would at least like the chance to leave an attractive corpse.

Vain? Maybe. But if Belle was going to be ushered to these luxurious rooms, she intended to make full use of them.

Belle had found a little clock on the writing desk, and its flashing gold hands read half-past four when she went into the washroom to bathe. She found the bathwater nice and hot, and the soap available to her soft and gentle on her skin. After allowing for enough time for her hair to dry, Belle focused her attention on clothing.

The dress she had put on this morning was plain wool, dyed a pale, weak green. It was clean, but it was also rather careworn, and wearing it to supper would thoroughly undermine any plan of leaving behind an attractive corpse. Then again, given the potential manner of death…

Suddenly feeling a little sick, Belle shook her head sharply, trying to banish the specter. There was a room with wardrobes. It stood to reason that there would be clothes in those wardrobes. She wanted to look decent at supper. Therefore, her next stop should be the room with the wardrobes.

The clothes were… Actually, it was rather difficult to describe what the clothes were. ‘Lavish’ was fast becoming overused; ‘opulent,’ maybe? ‘Opulent,’ definitely. The plainest, least expensive fabric Belle saw in any of the wardrobes was linen, and that linen was fine and soft, with a thread count she couldn’t begin to guess at. Everything woolen was, judging by the soft, slippery texture, lambswool, expensive and highly prized by the fashionable elite in Belle’s city. And Belle moaned wistfully every time she came across something in any shade of purple (reserved by law for royalty), couldn’t resist the urge to run her hands over ermine trim on clothing (also reserved for royalty), and outright gawped at glittering cloth of gold and silver (Reserved for the highest nobility—slightly less exclusive, but still thoroughly splendid to look at).

What was more, the designs of many of the gowns were unlike anything you would have seen the fashionable elite of Belle’s city wearing. Many of them, she recognized from study of old fashion plates as the mode of dress in times gone by, both in her homeland and in the nearby countries. There were some styles that were four or five hundred years old, and yet the gowns all looked brand new, as if the last stitch had been put in just the day before.

Most astounding of all (though given what this place was, perhaps it shouldn’t have been), every one of the gowns Belle conducted even the most cursory inspection of looked as though they would fit her.

Clearly, Belle had a lot to choose from, and she decided that if she was going to her last meal, she might as well wear something she would never have been able to otherwise.

She ended up selecting an outfit something like she had seen in one of her fashion plates. The overgown was shimmering cloth of silver that whispered with each step and twitch of her arms. It had a low, v-shaped neckline trimmed with soft ermine. The waistline was just under the bust, and was secured with a belt of rectangular silver plates; the skirt flowed straight down without flare. The sleeves of the gown opened at the shoulder and flowed like a waterfall almost to the floor, exposing the sleeves of her kirtle. Belle’s kirtle was fine white silk, whose sleeves were full and loose up until the thick, close-fitting cuffs. Seed pearls glistened at the cuffs and collar of the kirtle.

There was, if Belle remembered correctly, hennin that was usually worn with this sort of attire, and she couldn’t help but let out a short, breathless gasp when she turned and saw a small, circular table with a single leg that had _not_ been there before. Sitting on the table was a plain, wooden mannequin head dressed with a bi-horned brocaded white headdress a few inches tall, a diaphanous veil pinned to the back. A pair of dove gray silk gloves sat out to the side.

Belle considered it, but eventually decided against it. She’d never worn a headdress like that before, not even to a costume party, and it didn’t look entirely comfortable. Mindful of her rough, callused hands, she accepted the gloves gratefully. A necklace of deep bluish-green malachite beads completed the picture.

As Belle left the wardrobe room, she caught a sight, out of the corner of her eye, of her own self in the tall mirror in the back of the room. But it wasn’t herself, not quite. It was a flash of silver and a gleam of copper, a suggestion of a woman rather than the defined lines of the reflection.

The mirror at the vanity showed her more clearly, as Belle ran a brush slowly, methodically through her long auburn hair. Quiet and remote was the face it showed, white and almost shining in the light of the lamp that Belle had lit. Her mood had shifted many times over the course of the day, and now… It didn’t feel real. She was in a castle out of a fairy tale, in clothes out of the past, in a place out of time. None of it felt real. She was going to die, and she’d lost track of the reality of it. It was like death in a story, something that fled from the confines of the pages and was unknown and unknowable to the reader. It was all happening where she couldn’t see it.

As a final touch, Belle applied to her neck a perfume of intensely bitter scent, so bitter it made her lip curl involuntarily. She wasn’t certain what it was. She thought she could smell wormwood underneath it.

Out in the corridor, there were lanterns of polished glass and gleaming brass, hung on hooks and glowing with the light of the white candles lit within. Belle was perhaps getting used to her situation; that all these candles had been lit while she was shut up in “her” suite of rooms came as no shock whatsoever. Quivering spheres of misty golden light illuminated the long hallway, softened the edges of tables and pedestals. The air was still, perfectly still, but Belle fancied she felt the hallway breathe, slow and deep, like sucking in one last gulping breath before plunging underwater.

The castle was empty. Belle was alone. There was an air of… Oh, she didn’t know, something like when you were walking down a staircase towards a hallway that would take you into a crowded ballroom. There was the anticipation of company, of a great crowd of people. You couldn’t quite make out the flow of conversation; the great susurrus sounds like the ocean from far off, the roar of the waves reduced to a buzzing murmur. Every one of the doors she passed were closed, and she had the sense that all of them were full of people.

Ridiculous, of course. Still.

And it was ridiculous, when she started down the great staircase, the veins of gold shining and rippling like liquid fire, to startle and whip around, staring up behind her. What she heard reverberating against the vaulted roof was nothing but an echo. There was no reason to expect anyone behind her. Her host would be waiting in the great hall.

Once Belle was downstairs, while she might not have known where the great hall was, she hardly needed a sign pointing her in that direction. A delicious smell of cooked meat filled the air, enticing and inviting, beckoning her down just the corridors she needed to follow.

Her father had described a feast beyond imagining, a feast such as the likes of them had never enjoyed, a feast the likes of which it was certain some kings and emperors had never enjoyed. Her father… had not been exaggerating in the slightest.

Upon reaching the great hall, Belle’s eyes were riveted on the table as she approached, unable to process anything else. Her mouth watered at the sight of the food, and her stomach, which had given no protest of hunger since the faluche and the apple a few hours previously, began to growl anew.

A platter of sturgeon sat at the center of the table, gleaming with vinegar and flecked with parsley, black pepper, and minced ginger. Surrounding it were six bowls of white porcelain with roses painted in delicate strokes of gold. One bowl contained honey mustard eggs, the beaten yolks gleaming wetly in the candlelight. One contained sugared almonds. One held fresh blueberries, most cobalt blue and dotted with darker patches, some indigo, some tinted slightly purple at the edges. One hosted turnips cooked in cider and butter, the apple scent rising sweetly from the basin. Another was home to pears speckled with powdered cinnamon, floating in a dark syrup that smelled of wine. The sixth held roasted carrots, glazed with honey.

Off to the left of this display, there was a plate of white, crispy focaccia bread, smelling strongly of rosemary and sage. There was a tureen of frothy pink strawberry soup. Another tureen saw mushrooms and scallions floating in a creamy white broth.

Meanwhile, off to the right of the center display, there was a wheel of brie, a sparkling crystal decanter of pale, rosy pink wine, and a teapot filled with steaming black tea painted in the same style as the bowls surrounding the platter of sturgeon. There was a serving plate of blancmange, and a serving plate of heart-shaped tarts filled with cherry puree.

Ten people could have comfortably eaten from this table. Indeed, Belle had no idea how long it would have taken a human cooking staff to _make_ all of this food (perhaps there was, somewhere in the bowels of this castle, a kitchen staffed by fairies or spirits, but somehow, Belle doubted it); they’d likely have been working since before dawn, if not longer. Even at the height of her family’s wealth, they’d rarely had so much food on their dining table at once as all this. It was hardly as if Belle had went hungry during that period of her life—she’d been able to eat her fill every time she sat down to that table—but plenty such as this had been reserved for parties and balls and festivals. It was very much _not_ an everyday occurrence.

Belle’s eyes darted across the table as she tried to decide what to eat first. So much to choose from, and only so much room in her stomach; what a situation. It took far longer than it should have for Belle to realize that she was not alone.

It was the swish of heavy, brocaded skirts that finally alerted Belle to the presence of her host. Her eyes shot up, and her heart stopped dead in her chest when finally, for the first time, she got a proper look at the Beast.

Illuminated by the candlelight on the table and the (much fainter at this distance) light of the lanterns hung on the walls, the Beast should have been cast into deeper shadow, should have been harder to make out. And yet, the outlines of Belle’s host were presented to her with sharp, unforgiving clarity.

Her father had shuddered with palpable fear and disgust when he had given an admittedly quite vague description of what the Beast looked like. As Belle drank in the sight of the Beast, she felt a little frisson of fear run up her spine, but in place of disgust, an unwilling interest began to germinate in her mind.

The Beast was a little over seven feet tall and stood ramrod straight, so that when standing, Belle had to crane her neck to look her in the eye. On inspection, Belle thought that her thick, coarse fur was not black as her father had said, but perhaps sable-brown—the candlelight gave it an almost burnished shine. Eyes a piercing, caustic yellow, with vertical pupils like a cat’s, were set in the front of a long, narrow face, above a broad, flat nose, and an elongated jaw. Belle could make out the faintest sign of the tips of sharp teeth in her closed mouth.

The Beast wore a satin gown of black or maybe darkest blue, brocaded with gold thread woven in small, eight-pointed stars, with close-fitting sleeves. The collar of the gown was high up at the neck and stiff, with a spray of equally stiff white lace. Over her hands she wore thick black gloves that extended halfway up her forearms, embroidered with white or silver thread at the cuffs. Her attire worked effectively to conceal her body from view. Only a silhouette could be made out, and it did not appear so dissimilar from a tall, broad-shouldered human woman’s, though of course her face gave the lie to that.

Here was a mix of the human and the inhuman, and the sight of it induced Belle to do something she would never have done under normal circumstances: she stared.

Mercifully, the Beast seemed either not to mind being stared at, or she didn’t notice, or she had just expected being gawked at like a sideshow attraction. “Good evening,” she said, and though her voice was quiet, it was just as terrible to listen to as the Merchant had said, like the rough dragging of metal against stone.

After a few moments more, Belle remembered her manners, and forced herself to modulate her gaze to something less like brazen staring. “Good evening,” she replied, in a faint, thin voice. Was that how they were going to start this, then? With meaningless pleasantries?

Fine. Belle at least knew a thing or two about meaningless pleasantries.

When Belle said nothing more, the Beast drew herself up, stood even straighter and stiffer than she already did. Belle thought irritably to herself that this was such a _transparent_ way to try to intimidate a victim, but the seconds following dragged on in silence, and Belle began to wonder if that was what this was about, after all. The Beast’s shoulders were so straight and so stiff that they were quivering, ever so slightly. Belle didn’t think the faintly flickering candlelight was playing tricks on her with this.

She remained silent. Perhaps it would have been more sensible to be more accommodating, more pleasant. Perhaps putting on a show of ladylike charm would have made her death less painful. Belle had no desire to do anything that might amount to stepping forward of her own accord into gaping jaws. She kept her silence.

At last, the Beast’s mouth worked in silence, and then she said, “Be welcome at my table, and eat your fill.”

So Belle was at least to have this last meal before her death. She didn’t know if that made her feel better or worse. Her treacherous stomach certainly thought it was better, but the mind…

Oh, well. Though it would likely present no real inconvenience, Belle could perhaps at least eat as much food as she could bear without bursting, and leave that much less for the Beast and whatever else might dwell, invisible, within this castle.

Belle piled food high on her porcelain plate, wishing somewhat absurdly that she had a second stomach to spare for all of the food available to her. There wasn’t a single thing on this table that didn’t look and smell absolutely delicious, and Belle wasn’t going to get another chance to eat any of it. Even if this wasn’t—her stomach, however it might be twisting itself in hunger, dropped a little—her last meal, she certainly couldn’t eat her way through all of this food before it went cold, or stale, or spoiled.

As a compromise, Belle settled for small portions of the things on the table that she liked best; at least she could get a _mouthful_ of her favorite foods into her stomach before the meal (and other things) was concluded. Her stomach sent up another growl of protest to add to the litany of protests it had been adding since she first smelled the aroma of cooked food wafting from further in the castle. She wondered, briefly, if the food itself was enchanted to produce such a response—she wouldn’t have thought she would be so eager to eat, under the circumstances—but didn’t bother to ask. She didn’t want to exhibit curiosity. The answer would stop mattering very soon.

Not enchanted, perhaps, for when Belle noticed something, much later than she ought to have, her appetite fled her immediately.

The Beast’s plate was empty. The Beast had sat down in her chair (much larger than Belle’s, and without any cushions), and had made no attempt to fill her plate. She just watched Belle fill up hers, caustic yellow eyes lingering over Belle’s gloved hands as she selected morsels to set on her plate. Watched with the stillness of a cat, just before it pounced on a bird; all that was missing was the swishing of a long, bushy tail.

A terrible thought entered into Belle’s mind. She sat down at her chair, but her stomach was churning too badly for her to eat. She stared down at her plate, and pushed her food around with her fork.

A few minutes passed like this. Belle’s two-pronged silver fork clinked against the glossy porcelain of her plate; the wind moaned at the windows far off at the edge of the room. She wondered how long it would be before the charade was discarded. She wondered if she might not be sick before that happened. If she was to vomit, she hoped she could at least dirty the Beast’s gown as she did so. Something to be a little less convenient.

It took longer than Belle would have expected for her own lack of eating to draw attention. Patience was a quality of her captor’s, or perhaps the Beast simply hadn’t noticed until now. But after a while, that grating voice rose again. “Will you not eat?”

Sucking in a deep breath, “No. No, I think not.”

“Are you unwell?”

There were a few things that could stoke Belle’s temper from a cold ember to a fire in moments, and false concern under circumstances such as this was one of them. She slapped her fork down onto the table with a clang and met the Beast’s gaze with fury welling up in her chest. “Just how long do you intend to fatten me up,” she snapped, “before I’m finally plump enough to eat, hmm?”

Certainly got a reaction, that, though not the one Belle was expecting. The Beast reared back in her chair, eyes widening and long face contorting in something that might well have been horror. “I have not fallen so far as that!” she exclaimed, and her voice raised in what was unmistakably horror managed to sound slightly less grating than her voice set in controlled quiet.

“Then what?! If not eaten, am I to be strangled, beheaded, poisoned? Or is there some other method you prefer?!”

“No!” The Beast gripped the edge of the table in her gloved hands; Belle could hear what were either long fingernails or, more likely, long _claws_ scraping at the wood through the fabric. “You will meet no harm at my hands!”

“You said you would kill my father if he didn’t bring someone to take his place,” Belle fired back. “You don’t mean to kill me in his place?”

There came a vigorous shake of that sable head. “No, Belle, I do not. You will come to no harm as long as you dwell in this castle.”

Somehow, Belle believed her. It was foolish to believe her. Belle was completely at the mercy of the person sitting opposite her, someone whom she suspected was strong enough, just from her size, to subdue her and kill her with her bare hands. And yet, when the Beast told her that she would come to no harm here, that she had no intention of harming her, Belle believed her. She was choosing to believe her, choosing to believe that she would not die of violence in this place. It was better than believing that she could meet a violent death at any time.

Not that this made Belle happy. Relief had bloomed in her chest at the idea that she would not die tonight, but it soon shriveled and was replaced with a nearly-choking vine of anger wrapping around her heart. Her father had been threatened with death, and this was the outcome. Charming.

Well, it was difficult (for Belle, at least) being angry on an empty stomach, so Belle finally stopped pushing her food around on her plate and started actually eating it.

The food… It was so good that Belle could scarcely remember to be angry while she ate; the food tasted every bit as good as it looked and smelled. The sturgeon was firm and well-cooked, still hot despite spending several minutes on her plate, and the vinegar it had soaked in paired wonderfully with the parsley, pepper, and ginger, let alone its lean, savory flesh. Belle hadn’t had fish in more than three years, and such a cut of fish was a wonderful way to end the dry spell. The mustard in the honey mustard egg Belle had taken from its bowl pricked wonderfully at her tongue. The blueberries were as sweet and as juicy and as flavorful as any Belle had ever eaten.

The Beast still didn’t eat, and Belle told herself not to concern herself with it.

After Belle set her plate aside, the Beast spoke to her again. “I have only two strictures that I ask you to obey during your time here. I ask that you join me for supper at seven o’clock, every night.” Regardless of the fact that she herself did not seem interested in actually _eating_ at supper.

The Beast paused, her mouth opening and shutting again so that Belle could see more of the white, sharp teeth in her mouth. They didn’t look as if they were proportioned quite right for her mouth—weren’t overlarge enough to impede speech, but were overlarge enough to be visibly awkward in the mouth—which didn’t make sense to Belle, though she couldn’t make out what it was that didn’t make sense.

“I ask also,” the Beast said slowly, not quite meeting Belle’s eyes, “that you not leave the castle after dark.”

To that, Belle tilted her head. “Why not?”

“These are the only strictures I place on you,” the Beast went on, as if she hadn’t heard. “Aside from that, you may do as you wish for as long as you dwell here.” In the sort of resigned voice as if she didn’t care if Belle, for instance, found a sledgehammer and began pounding away at the walls and whatever glass or statuary she found. “I must take my leave.”

Before Belle could say anything more, the Beast rose from the table and left the room, walking with a long, slightly loping gait to the door on the far end of the room from where Belle had entered. The door swung shut behind her, and Belle was left with the sound of rain beginning to patter gently on the windows.

Belle sighed, and grabbed a couple of cherry hearts from the table before she left the hall.


	8. Chapter Eight

Belle woke with difficulty the next morning, stiff in spite of the extraordinarily soft, yielding mattress on which she lied. A weak, wan strip of sunlight filtered through the gap in the curtains over the door out to the balcony, painting the floor where it touched milky pale. Lying half on her stomach on the bed, Belle’s eyes fixed on that strip of sunlight, watching the way it flickered when clouds passed over the sun (or, perhaps, when clouds let the sun shine at all; her mind was still heavy with sleep, and she wasn’t entirely clear on this matter), with the unfixed fascination of one still shaking off sleep.

She had dreamed last night. She couldn’t remember what her dreams had contained. Belle’s dreams had never really been the stuff of vivid memories, never been things that could stamp themselves clearly on her mind. Even her nightmares left upon her waking mind only vague sounds and images; the emotions they inspired lingered much longer than the substance of the nightmares themselves.

Her dream… It was like any other dream she’d had in her life. She couldn’t remember it in any real detail. It had left her waking stiff and tense, as if she’d spent the whole night with her arms and legs stretched as far from her body as they could without breaking. She hadn’t jolted awake as she had with certain other nightmares, but neither had waking been the easiest, most comfortable thing. What little she remembered were patches of blood, of light gleaming on long white teeth.

The threat of death had been removed, but it seemed that Belle’s dreaming mind had yet to catch up with the reality of the waking world. Such was life.

And Belle’s life was to be spent here, in this place, so she had better get up and get on with it.

Perhaps it was self-indulgent—no, it was definitely self-indulgent, and on second thought, she wasn’t going to bother feeling embarrassed by it—but Belle took another bath before doing anything else. It had been so long since she had last been able to take a hot water bath whenever she wanted, and it wasn’t like she had ever been able to submerge her body completely in hot water before; there were bathhouses in the city, but her father had always thought them immoral, and forbade his daughters to patronize them. The nearly-steaming water worked the stiffness out of Belle’s muscles in minutes, and she had an enjoyable time staring up at a ceiling adorned with a mural of mermaids sunning on craggy rocks.

Now that the threat of death had been lifted from her, now that there was no phantom axe hovering over the back of her neck, Belle’s curiosity about this new place came to her in a torrent, demanding satisfaction. It wasn’t home. She couldn’t imagine it being home. But it was the place where she was to live her life, and she would know as much about it as she could.

After dressing herself in a golden silk gown that was far plainer than what she had worn to supper the night before, but still something she would never have been able to wear outside of this uncanny place, Belle ventured outside of her rooms, ready to drink in the sights.

The corridor outside of her rooms was just as well-appointed as her rooms had been. The walls were hung with tapestries shot through with glittering gold and silver thread, depicting flowers and hunting scenes and kings and queens Belle didn’t recognize from any book of history. At one point, she spied a tapestry that depicted a sailing ship upon a storm-tossed sea, and her mouth quirked bitterly at the sight of it. There were tables of shiny, rich red or brown or black wood, upon which there sat vases of flowers, white poppies and lavender and ball-like yellow chrysanthemums. In recessed alcoves in the walls there were sculptures of men and women whose eyes Belle could never catch, no matter how she might try to. The rugs that ran in strips down the center of the hallways were thick and soft to the touch, thoroughly muffling Belle’s footfalls when she walked on them.

Her family would have loved this place, if it had been somewhere that was open for them to visit and live in without a cloud of terror hanging over it. Solène would have been in raptures over the food and the jewelry. Ghislaine would have been sniffing at each of the perfumes, her eyes alight with interest, and Belle suspected it would have taken days to pry her oldest sister from the gloriously soft bed. Even now, if he was here, her father would have been poring over the furniture, over the tapestries and the statuary, trying to guess at their worth. He might even have been able to guess accurately at the glass-faced cabinet full of decorative porcelain dishes that Belle passed by.

It was too late for any of that, now.

Wandering aimlessly about the second floor, only half-trying to find the staircase down, yielded up furnishings as lavish as those Belle had seen just outside her door. Glances outside the windows yielded up the sight of a heavily-overcast, roiling pewter sky, and smudges of green closer to the ground that Belle would have to wait until she was outside to see more of.

Belle wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, but she saw no sign of the staircase until after she had firmly resolved to go downstairs. She had expected to come across it randomly while she was wandering, but instead, there was no sign of it, and then she doubled back, and found it in an open space that she couldn’t remember having walked through before that day. Likely she had just gotten turned around. Hopefully, she had just gotten turned around. It if turned out that part of the magic of this place was such that the corridors of the castle were capable of changing while Belle’s back was turned, Belle wasn’t certain how well she would cope with that. She didn’t want to live in a labyrinth. Belle must have missed the staircase earlier, after all.

Through all her wandering upstairs, Belle had seen neither hide nor hair of the Beast. Her solitude relieved her as much as it confused her. In buildings such as this, all of the personal chambers were typically to be found on the second floor, or at least they were in the books Belle had read. The bedrooms had been on the second floor of all the houses Belle had lived in and visited in her time (those that had more than one floor, anyhow); it seemed to her that it was only natural for castles to follow the same layout.

The Beast’s chambers must be somewhere on the second floor; to Belle’s mind, that was the only thing that made sense. Those doors that would actually yield to her attempts to open them this morning showed her rooms that were bare and empty, not somewhere that was actually fit to live in. All these empty rooms, and nowhere did Belle see any rom that looked like it might be where the Beast lived. Nowhere did she see any sign of the Beast herself.

Solitude might have been for the best, Belle reflected, listening to her footsteps reverberating on the stairs. She welcomed the chance to explore the castle without the piercing eyes of her host examining her as she did so. If she was to convince herself that this place was home, it would be easier if she could develop the beginnings of an attachment to it unimpeded by the sort of scrutiny that would make her skin prickle and destroy her concentration. Better to develop the beginnings of an attachment unimpeded by her own temper getting the better of her.

Downstairs, Belle resumed her wandering, the only sound greeting her being that of the swishing rustle of her silk skirt. When she didn’t find the Beast after a few minutes of wandering downstairs, she realized for the first time that her pulse had begun to race as she felt that same pulse suddenly slow. Belle knew herself well enough to know that there would eventually come a time when she was desperate enough for company that she would welcome the company of her captor. She knew herself well enough to recognize that this time might come about relatively soon. Until that time came, though, she was content to be alone.

 _Perhaps just seeing her at supper would be enough to keep me from becoming too desperate for company_. Belle couldn’t decide whether the thought soothed her or not.

Belle found the great hall where she had eaten supper the night before. The table was completely bare; even the table cloth was missing. In the light of day, the chamber was barer than Belle would have expected, especially when compared to the other chambers she had seen. There was a large fireplace behind where the Beast had sat, and behind where Belle had sat the floor just soared away until it met the far wall with its windows. In the dark, when the only light was the light of the candles, the great hall had an enclosing, pressing sense of intimacy. In the light, with the table bare of food and not even a leftover scent of cooked food remained, it was a lonely place. Belle did not linger long.

Belle found what, when she was approaching it, had seemed like an empty hall, but when she reached it turned out to be a gallery. This she approached with interest, hoping that the paintings framed on the wall would give her some clue as to who had dwelled in this castle before the Beast. But when she reached the gallery, she found that though there were a multitude of paintings, not a single one of them contained a human figure. Not as the clear subject of the painting, and not as a background figure.

The paintings were done in several different styles. Some were so realistic that Belle felt as though she could step over bottom edge of the frame into the world of the painting, without the canvas giving the slightest amount of resistance. Others were bright slashes of paint that made her head spin to look at, for they seemed to sway in an invisible, intangible breeze.

Belle never found any kitchen or some of the other rooms associated with the preparation of food in a castle (not that she could call her inspection a truly thorough one, when it simply involved walking wherever her feet took her), nor any armories, nor any doors in the floor that looked like they could have been entryways to a cellar. What she did come across were multiple salons and some smaller rooms that Belle thought must have been meant as boudoirs, for there was just something about them, their enclosed space with curtained windows, that suggested privacy. Each of these salons and boudoirs were done in different color schemes, had a different sort of aesthetic—some with over-stuffed furniture, some with iron-wrought furniture, some dark and enclosed, some light and airy.

However, the crowning find of the morning had to be the library.

Belle would admit that she was not so avid a reader that she regularly spent the entire day reading books. On top of the fact that, over the past three years, she didn’t have enough books on hand to do something like that, when she had lived in the city as a wealthy young lady, she had had other diversions and other obligations. She hadn’t read books all day, every day when she lived in the city; she hadn’t _wanted_ to read books all day, every day.

But she had read books when she found the time to do so. Besides her books of fashion plates, there had been histories and books of poetry and old stories. Poetry was Belle’s favorite, if only because the cadence of certain poems lulled her into an airy, untroubled state. Through books, you learned more about the world, and Belle was always willing to learn more about the world. Being shown to be ignorant was too humiliating to be borne; Belle didn’t know how anyone else could stand it.

Many of the wealthy in the city had had respectable libraries in their homes. There were always those who looked down their noses on anything resembling academic pursuits, but for the most part, having a decent collection of books was considered a surefire mark of culture, and being considered cultured was something very desirable to the fashionable elite. If the Merchant’s pretty youngest daughter asked to borrow one of their books, rarely did they say ‘no.’

The library Belle found in this castle was on a completely different level from the libraries she had known back in the city. It was not, as Belle had thought on first glance, larger than the largest of her father’s old friends’ houses, but it was a near thing. The library was two storeys tall, a ring of bookshelves pressed up against the wall surrounding a few freestanding bookshelves on the ground floor and tables and plush-cushioned chairs scattered about.

If she just sat down in this library, never got up again, and just read books on end, how long would it take her to get through all of these books? Year? Decades? Belle wasn’t the quickest reader in the world; where Solène could just speed through a thick tome, Belle’s pace was closer to plodding. If she lived to be an old woman, there was every chance this library would have provided her with entertainment for the rest of her life.

Belle scratched her fingers against the threshold of the door into the library, bit her lip so hard she was shocked it didn’t start to bleed. She had to explore further, had to see more of what there was to see. The library would (she hoped) still be there when she had more time to come sit down and read a book. Slowly, her feet dragging slightly against the floor, she walked away from the library, and on down the hall.

Eventually, Belle’s wandering feet carried her outside. She didn’t pass through any door that she could see; this part of the castle just opened into a gallery that opened into a stone veranda that at last opened into the outside. High above the ground at the base of the hill (manmade, magic-made, or otherwise unnatural; it rose so much higher than the gentle, rolling slopes of the castle grounds), Belle was treated to a vista as lovely as it was strange.

Far away, she could make out the very point at which the holly wall of the castle stood, for though the trees were thick on both side of the holly wall, only on one side were they crowned with snow. Within the confines of the holly wall, the world was lush and green and warm; without, it was locked in barren winter, and Belle felt a pang for her father, wondering how he had found his journey home.

 _He’ll certainly be home by now_ , she told herself stoutly. _He had no trouble reaching home from this place before, and I don’t think there’s been any fresh snowfall. He’s home by now._ (Had he been thinking about her very much?)

Belle tore her eyes away from the snow-crowned trees, and focused on the grounds of the castle where she was now to live. Even if she wouldn’t have time to explore the entirety of the grounds today (or even the whole of the week; this place was no smaller than it had been when Belle first rode through it), she wanted a good look at the place from this vantage point.

The sky was no less overcast than it had been when she woke. Gray and roiling like the surface of a pot filled with boiling soup, there were a few gaps in the cloudbanks to let shafts of watery light through, but they were few and far between. They shone over a world that glistened with water beads, a world so welcomingly, if unnaturally, _green_. The trees and the rolling hills populated with swaying grass and vibrant flowers. The little lines of silver that Belle took to be brooks; the little circles of silver she took to be ponds.

Her eyes strayed closer to the castle itself, to the terraces down below her. She saw flower gardens and delicate, decorative trees and equally delicate, decorative fountains. Silver puddles flashed glassily in the stray beams of light. Splashes of color in this overcast world, and Belle drank it in voraciously, as if she had been living her whole life in a dull, gray world and this was the first vivid color she had ever been blessed with the sight of.

And there, just one level down from Belle, walking amongst beds of cornflowers and lilacs, was the Beast.

Belle froze, her mind struggling to work. When the moment passed, she turned on her heel, blood pounding in her ears. She didn’t want… It was difficult to think. She didn’t want this. Didn’t want to provoke a confrontation or be dragged into one. Her anger wasn’t… She didn’t know if her anger could carry her through it; it always seemed to rear its head on its own, like a thing completely separate from her, that just happened to live inside her. Something that felt so good to indulge, but always seemed to carry her down paths strange to her feet when she gave it free license. Against someone likely capable of ripping her limb from limb with her bare hands, Belle did not think she could stand.

She needed more time to decide what to say.

She wasn’t going to get that time.

It might have been a miscalculation to wear a golden dress on such a dreary day. The castle was not a drab building, but its stone was still gray, and in the gloomy day she must have stood out very much, for the Beast to lift her head so quickly, and lock eyes with her. Belle’s back stiffened. Those eyes were so vivid, so piercing; even from some fifteen, twenty feet away, Belle could still make out their caustic yellow color with no difficulty.

Belle’s feet were rooted to the spot as the Beast made her way up the mossy stairs to meet her. Watching the Beast walk around in broad daylight gave Belle a better look at the way she walked. There was still the long, loping gait she had observed last night, but in proper light, there was something decidedly stiff about the way the Beast held herself, like she was forcing herself to walk upright, in spite of being clearly, obviously bipedal. It was, and yet wasn’t, like watching the way a puppet would “walk” when being manipulated by a puppeteer, and the artificiality of it grated on Belle’s skin, while stoking her curiosity to an unwilling burn.

“Good morning,” the Beast said to her, once they stood on the same terrace and Belle was forced to look up into her eyes, rather than down. The Beast folded her gloved hands, one on top of the other, on top of her thick black skirt. “How did you find your sleep?” she asked next, as if that was the most natural thing in the world to ask someone who had just spent her first night in the place she would spend the rest of her life, cut off from the world—and perhaps the Beast herself recognized the question for what it was, for her guttural voice was also noticeably brittle.

This was, as always, a game Belle knew how to play. “Well,” and she looked past the Beast to the desolately beautiful grounds.

“You found your bed to be to your liking?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, yes.”

A cool breeze, wet with rain, gusted up to meet them. Skirts swished. A nearby bed of deep red petunias quivered in the breeze; the Beast’s sable fur rustled.

“And your accommodations are to your liking?” the Beast pressed.

Belle turned her back, slowly, deliberately, praying to whatever would listen that provoking anger would not provoke a slashing blow to her back, and made a show of poring over a tiny fountain she had spotted nestled among a cluster of slightly overgrown azalea bushes. “Yes.”

She practically heard the Beast bristle; the noise a dress made when its wearer drew suddenly to their full height was, to Belle’s ears, very distinctive. With a harsh snarl, “Is my form so revolting to you, that you will not even _look_ at me as we speak?!”

At that, Belle straightened and whirled around, eyes flashing. “Does it really surprise you?” The moment of confrontation had arrived; there was little else for it but to be swept away. The Beast’s face was twisted in a mask of anger that made it even more ghastly than before, but the anger smoldering in Belle’s breast smothered fear. Belle took a step forward, coming into range and not finding it in herself to care. “Does it really surprise you that I would find your face revolting, when it is the face of the one who threatened to kill my father over a _rose_?!”

“I had no choice!” the Beast exclaimed, drawing, if possible, even taller, though whether it was a gesture meant to intimidate or simply some involuntary signal of discomfort, Belle couldn’t tell—not that she cared overmuch.

Belle put her hands on her hips and snorted, eyebrow raised. “Oh, you had no choice. _You_ had no choice? This is your castle! As best as I can tell, before I came here, you were the only intelligent creature _living_ here!” She slashed the air, gesturing at the desolate grounds for emphasis. “You make the rules! You decide what is acceptable and what’s not! _You_ are the one who decided that the penalty for picking a rose was _death_!”

More patently self-serving denials, that was what Belle was expecting. That was what always seemed to happen when she dealt with this type of person; if she got drawn into a confrontation, they always seemed intent on slithering out with that old refrain. Instead, the Beast, who, while she had drawn herself up taller, hadn’t actually changed her stance or the positioning of her hands this whole time, actually shifted for the first time. She put her hands on her hips, which would have infuriated Belle had what she said next not taken her aback: “What makes you think _I_ decide the rules?”

And it did take Belle aback, but only for a moment, before she recovered enough to fire back, “You are the master of this castle. By what measure do you _not_ make the rules?”

There came something that might have been the bitter huff of a laugh, had it not sounded quite so rasping. “Surely you have noticed that this place is subject to enchantment. Do you think the enchantments that rule over the castle and the grounds come without rules of their own, rules that I, no fairy, no witch, just a monster, have no control over?”

This time, Belle remained silent. She stared searchingly into the Beast’s face, trying to guess at any signal of deception. There was nothing she could really latch onto. She was better at catching out lies when the person telling lies was someone she knew, and knew well. She was better at catching out lies when the face she looked into was that of a human being, when the features of the face were recognizably human, when it had the typical tells of deception and she could watch for those tells. It wasn’t just the stretched, distorted shape of the face, but also the fur that was throwing Belle off.

For her part, the Beast stared levelly at Belle for long moments, waiting, Belle got the impression, for her to speak. When it at last became clear to the Beast that she would have to be the one to speak, she shut her eyes for a long moment, then opened them again, just as level.

“The magic which governs this place recognizes a master of the castle, one who dwells here and governs this place in a temporal sense. As of this moment, I am the one recognized as the master of the castle. The magic that was woven into this land holds me to be the master of the castle. As such, I have full rights to this place, and can extend certain rights—both to guests who stay a short time, and those who stay longer.

“Magic does not look upon acts of theft, even minor ones, kindly. This magic especially does not look on such kindly; even the plucking of a rose from a roadside path is not to be tolerated. The magic of this place—“ the Beast drew a deep breath that was like the rumbling of distant thunder “—will consider only one penalty for such a theft.”

Belle thought she was beginning to understand. “And that penalty is…”

“Death,” the Beast supplied, baring her teeth in… Well, her face lent itself quite well to mirthless smiles. “But there is a way to circumvent the penalty. The master of the castle may decide on another penalty for the theft; I have had little opportunity to decide what will satisfy it, and I do not know how much time it will take for it to forget what was done, but thus far, it seems to have been going well. Make no mistake: had your father disobeyed my edict, he would have died. Had he returned here by himself, I would have found some solution that might have satisfied the magic; likely the same arrangement that you and I have settled on.”

Alright, that did… But still, there was one thing Belle did _not_ understand. “Why didn’t you tell my _father_ all of this?” she pressed, eyes narrowed.

“It was important that he understand the gravity of the situation he was in,” the Beast responded, so quickly that Belle wondered if it wasn’t rehearsed. “If he had believed he wasn’t in serious danger of death, he would not have returned.”

Cruelty was something that made Belle’s blood boil. Now, she was finding herself pushed close to that point by obtuseness, which was _certainly_ a new experience for her. “Excuse me? My father is no fool; if you tell him that the enchantment over the castle will _kill him_ for the picking of a rose, he won’t respond to it as if you had told him he was to be given a fine he could easily avoid paying.”

The mirthless smile was back. “I should be more specific. I did not want for an immediate terror with which to impress him of the gravity of his situation. Magic would have been abstract, but he was visibly, immediately terrified of _me_. Horrific ugliness does have certain uses, after all,” the Beast muttered, looking away from Belle at last.

Belle had no idea what to say to that. It occurred to her that she could bristle, but she just… She just couldn’t…

She just couldn’t find it in herself to bristle. She didn’t know what it was. Maybe the exhaustion of clarified miscommunication. Maybe her own uncertainty. Maybe something small and squirming she had caught lurking at the edges of the Beast’s voice. She didn’t think it was a lie. Again, she was willing to trust in her host’s truthfulness.

Finally, she settled upon a question: “How long will I be required to stay here?”

The Beast made a rolling motion with her shoulders that might have been a shrug, before catching herself mid-motion and forcing her shoulders to still. “I am not certain. As I said, I am neither a witch nor a fairy. I don’t have a strong enough grasp of magic to know how long a stay will satisfy it.”

So living here wasn’t forever, perhaps. She might one day go home, perhaps. Belle digested the news, and felt as numb as she would have from standing out in the snow for hours on end. Without a clear end date in sight, it still felt very much like forever. Her situation had changed, and yet it hadn’t.

If the Beast had told her this at the outset, Belle wondered if she might not feel differently. She’d grant that not even a full day after she arrived was fairly prompt. She’d grant that one so apparently awkward a conversationalist as the Beast might not have been able to find an opening when Belle herself was trying so hard to block attempts at conversation.

 _My father doesn’t know_. He’d find out, if she was sent away from this place before he died an old man. _My sisters don’t know_. Provided Belle herself was not set away as an old woman, her sisters would see—would hopefully see—that she had not died here. But they did not know, and what they must think…

Or perhaps they did not think that at all. Belle could not begin to guess. Her head felt like her brain had been replaced with wool. She did not know what to think, did not know what to feel.

Belle stared out on the grounds, conscious, if only distantly, of the fact that the Beast had not left her side. This place truly was like something out of a fairy tale, down to the powerful green smell carried to Belle’s nose with each gust of wind. If the border of the forest had seen the earth feel more intensely alive than the city had ever felt, surely all else was dead and dust compared to the land here, land so intensely alive that Belle caught herself waiting to hear it speak.

A cold, damp, green gust of wind blustered up to meet Belle, sending her loose auburn hair into complete disarray. As she tried to put her hair to rights, her eyes drifted towards her companion.

She thought the Beast had been looking t her. When Belle looked up at the Beast’s face, she caught yellow eyes quickly darting away from her, instead fixing on the middle distance. Belle felt no such shyness, instead devoting herself to studying the Beast more closely.

The fear had left her. The Beast’s features had not changed one bit, but Belle found that what fear had been inspired in her at the thought of looking on this form had left her entirely. So now she could find herself looking at the Beast’s face, and it _was_ an interesting face. In Belle’s experience, beauty wore relatively few faces, and there were always similarities you could pick out, if you knew what to look for. Beauty was a pleasure to behold, but it could grow old, after a while. What was strange, even grotesque, on the other hand, was so varied that there were no patterns that Belle could pick up on. The slit nostrils of the Beast’s nose flared when she breathed, and unless Belle was very much mistaken, the Beast had two sets of eyelids. Her fur was more lustrous than Belle would have thought.

“What is your name?”

The question spilled from her lips all of a sudden, without any thought behind it. When it reached the air, it surprised Belle as much as it did the Beast, who visibly stiffened and narrowed her eyes at her.

“As I told your father,” and her voice was just as stiff as her back, “I am called ‘the Beast.’ I am not ‘Madame,’ ‘My Lady,’ or ‘Your Highness.’ I am the Beast.”

By the end, the words had come out in a hot rush, and Belle frowned. “But surely you must have a name?” she pressed. “Either one that was given to you, or one you gave yourself. I can’t just go on calling you ‘the Beast’ if we’re to live together.”

The third mirthless smile to take hold on the Beast’s face unfurled much more slowly than the last, a grotesque show of long teeth and barely-there lips contorting in the mockery of happiness. “Don’t you know, Belle,” she said, in a voice like breaking glass, “that monsters have no need of names?”

While Belle was left staring, stunned, the Beast swept past her, back into the castle, and out of sight.

They said nothing to one another for the rest of the day. Indeed, Belle saw no sign of the Beast until seven o’clock that night, when she took supper in the great hall. The Beast was silent, and Belle, though by then brimming with questions, kept her silence on all of them.

The Beast watched Belle transfer pickled peppers and plums stewed with cloves to her plate with something close to longing shining in her eyes, so nakedly that Belle could not have mistaken it. Once again, the Beast did not eat.


End file.
